


The Capitulation

by dancerinthedrink



Category: The Riot Club (2014)
Genre: Alistair Ryle Being an Asshole, Anal Sex, Arguing, Attempt at Humor, Banter, British Museum, British Politics, Canon-Typical Behavior, Dialogue Heavy, Dirty Talk, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Falling In Love, Friends With Benefits, Kissing, M/M, Mentions of British Royal Family, Mutual Masturbation, Not Beta Read, Oral Sex, Post-Coital Cuddling, Studying, University, british politics as quickly googled by an american, characters look at photos again, epigraphs: we upgraded bitch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-21 00:53:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,014
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30013590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dancerinthedrink/pseuds/dancerinthedrink
Summary: “You see, I’ve a report due for a history class about the rise of the Tories. And I was wondering, you being the nearest thing to Scruton I’ve got, if you’d be willing to lend me a little of your expertise.”“Sure.”
Relationships: Alistair Ryle/Miles "Milo" Richards
Kudos: 1





	The Capitulation

_Thou hast beat me out  
Twelve several times, and I have nightly since  
Dreamt of encounters 'twixt thyself and me._

\- William Shakespeare, _Coriolanus_ , Act III, Scene v

_Blind loving wrestling touch, sheath'd hooded sharp-tooth'd touch!  
Did it make you ache so, leaving me?_

\- Walt Whitman, _Song of Myself_

_Have sex in a voting booth!_

\- John Waters

The room was shit. Not aesthetically, mind. The building was a medieval monolith that had touring students gasping in awe whenever they were ushered past it, oohing and ahhing at the sample dormitories with the original stone walls banged together in 1316, (age as a point of pride, like obnoxious quinquagenarians saying they’re fifty-seven “years young”) interior kept immaculate by a hidden army of servants. Sorry, _staff_. Alistair had learned the hard way referring to the staff as servants to the middle-classes or, heaven forbid, to their faces would only facilitate a lecture on classism then a conference with his head of house about etiquette. 

It wasn’t as if Alistair wasn’t used to rubbing elbows with boys who had to make their own beds growing up. At Harrow, the scholarship students ran thick and fast through classrooms, kissing beak ass and hurling balls of mud on the rugby pitch. Though it was entertaining how they tried to keep up the regality of a boy in a school centuries old and how often they forget that just to be a boy. 

He had gone by Al at Harrow when he wasn’t Ryle (or Ryled Up or a Tryle to Talk With or Ryly Minogue). And his peers never batted an eye. He made himself feel it was good practice. Being able to talk to the common folk in the vernacular was a skill politicians needed to survive past general elections. The memories were fond enough that Alistair had almost regretted his decision not to hang his boater on the wall for fear an old Etonian would drop in for tea and ridicule him mercilessly. 

The furniture had been bought by his parents the year Sebastian entered Oxford, each piece selected to fit perfectly and stylishly within the room and had remained in storage until Alistair’s matriculation a year after Seb left.

Seb was everywhere in the room. It was impossible not to see him hunched over his desk in a position that made Alistair’s back ache just to recall, or smell his dirty socks under the aroma of lemon floor polish and the dusty granules of old stone, or hear the burst of air expelled from between his teeth whenever he was listening to messages disagreeable. 

Alistair had come up on weekends to visit, to sleep on the floor covered in laundry, to tag along to early morning classes. So easy it was to fall in love with Oxford. 

He had witnessed the sheltered, picturesque Oxford experience. Seb had studied chemistry so the most liberal bullshit he had to put with were druggies who wanted meth legalised in his combustion seminars, unlike Alistair who had to meet up with Milo Fucking Richards every week for tutorials and try to get it through his thick head that Jeremy Corbyn’s income tax plans were only the pipe dream of a resentful middle class.

Alistair wished Milo would go into campaigning and consulting after he graduated because if he _actually_ became a politician and _actually_ got elected, he could really fuck over the country. He was a socialist on the rise. 

One day he had the nerve to wear a small red flag in his back pocket and Alistair was distracted the entire class, staring at his ass whenever he shifted in his seat, his face turning as scarlet as the hankie, endlessly livid.

“Mr Ryle, could I see you for a moment?” his tutor asked after they had wrapped up the day’s session, having already assigned the week’s topic: the gradual legalisation of homosexuality within the United Kingdom.

Alistair’s cheeks prickled. He nodded and tried to pretend he hadn’t seen Milo’s self-righteous grin as he packed his bag. 

“You’re off your game, Ryle,” he said after Milo had disappeared with a jaunty wave, red flag bouncing off his ass like a tail. “Richards had you stroke for stroke until he forgot the Corn Laws. He said the foundation of the Liberal Party was a natural extension of the Whigs and you said nothing. I can’t see any reason why you would let that slip by.”

“Sorry, sir,” Alistair said. He really didn't have time for this. There was a bit of beige thread on the hardwood floor and he nudged it around with the toe of his shoe, watching it twist and writhe through the dust. 

“It’s not like you.”

“I know sir.”

“Last week too. I assigned the Cold War because I thought it was something you could really sink your teeth into. And you rolled over like a puppy. Now, I didn’t know your brother as well as other faculty but I know he was a _firecracker_ in a debate.”

“I know; I’m sorry.”

He remembered how awful that debate had gone for him. Stuttering over every Russian patronymic and surname, basically reciting his essay when he ran out of ideas. Each rebuttal was like a cut from a rapier. If that duel had been fought with weapons instead of words, Alistair would be dead.

His tutor fell back in his chair and let out an endless breath like he was a balloon being squeezed for air. “I don’t want to hear that you’re sorry, I want you to do better.”

“I will.” He waited until it seemed there was nothing more to say. “Can I go now?”

Alistair left the room cursing himself, every squeak of his shoes against the old floors acting as a drill bit that distracted him from organising his thoughts. He’d go to the library and check out everything pertaining to the history of the Conservative Party and read until his head spun with facts and he could counter all of Milo’s liberal whinging with rhetoric flawless enough that Milton’s Lucifer would be awed.

Speaking of Milo, he was bent in half, slurping from a water fountain whose garish 80s bulk made Alistair’s stomach turn whenever he saw it stuck into the side of the beautiful old walls.

Alistair paused for a moment but decided to barrel ahead rather than turn on his heel and go out the back exit which was his first instinct. If Milo felt him on his periphery, he’d only assume Alistair was running away from his adversary and act even more smug the next week.

Cool as ice, or at least hoping he appeared to be (he was clutching and twisting the strap of his bag tightly enough that later, when he finally opened his fists, he would find red imprinted wrinkles on his palms.), Alistair trod past Milo’s backside, the muscles in his shoulders expressly clenching in the millisecond their bodies were parallel.

While he was slightly relaxed at braving that particular beast, Alistair refused to let his guard down and mentally congratulated himself for doing so when he heard the bark of “OI!” explode behind him and the tripping of rubber-soled hooves. He didn't flinch once.

“Glad I caught you,” Milo said, panting theatrically. “I was afraid you had gone out the back, and I’d have to dig up the old room assignment to find you-”

“What do you want Richards?” Alistair cut him off. 

Milo shifted from foot to foot, his eyebrows pushed together in a puppy-dog imploring way, and hiked his bag higher on his shoulder.

“You see, I’ve a report due for a history class about the rise of the Tories. And I was wondering, you being the nearest thing to Scruton I’ve got, if you’d be willing to lend me a little of your expertise.”

“Sure.”

“Really?” Milo’s head jerked up; his brow was bent incredulously. 

Alistair was surprised himself. He hadn’t given a second thought to agreeing, hadn’t weighed the pros and cons of his choices. It couldn’t have been that stupid expression Milo had made. It’s not like Alistair was a soft-hearted sap that could be won over with a bit of depressive play-acting. He could still recant though.

“Of course really.” Alistair tossed his head. “But I’ve got a lunch meeting and then a three-hour lecture so the earliest you can come over is five. That is, if you don’t have anything going on.”

“Five’s great. Thanks mate, see you then.” Milo grinned, his big stupid mouth cracking open to reveal his slightly crooked teeth. He threw a pat on Alistair’s shoulder as he brushed past, skidding to the stairs and disappearing.

The room was shit, but it didn’t have to look like shit so Alistair ducked out of his lecture a half-hour early to tidy up which, by his standards, was to dust everything down to the lampshades and obsessively checking to see if his duvet was hanging in a straight line. Had he owned a spirit level he would have pulled it out in a heartbeat.

All in all, there wasn’t much to clean up. He wasn’t one of those sloppy types who throw whatever wherever. He cared about hygiene, cleanliness, unlike Sebastian; his brother was wont to leave so much trash in every room he passed through that he was solely responsible for two separate black mold buildups in the bathroom sinks.

So all he really had to do was drag out his favorite William Pitt biography and scribble out a few notes to consult during the business then spend the next twenty minutes in a state of perpetual anxiety as he tried to read _A Clockwork Orange_ while glancing up at the door every fifty to seventy seconds until Nadsat became even more incomprehensible than it already was. 

There wasn’t much he could do while he waited. He could scroll through the copies of photos his mum had bought from a Sotheby’s auction: Egglestons, stuff he found mundane but stuff mum raved over but she did rave over everything; it was so unsettling to have your mother call you in from the next room to show you a newly acquired Mapplethorpe print of Joe Bloggs caked in leather or a dick urinating into a champagne glass. His flowers were nice though, and a couple of his portraits.

He could work or he could try watching a film. He had been meaning to get into film - _La Jetée_ , _The 400 Blows_ , _Rashomon_ \- but ended up inevitably replaying what he had liked as a kid. Had he a person to watch with, to make dumb comments with, he could muscle his way through the stark splashes of black-and-white drama without falling into himself at every blunt kiss.

There was no one to call for a consultation or just to waste the minutes with.

All he could do was prickle with impatience.

His ears were perked to the knocking about that went on outside his door, but after a few over-eager half risings from his armchair, he concluded it was the Fulbright scholar next door who was always having freshmen over, charming them incomprehensibly with her practiced Mormon charisma, and playing hymnal music whenever she needed the spiritual guidance for her degree. 

By four-fifty he was glued to the face of his electric alarm clock, waiting for the toothpaste green numbers to shift. By five-fifteen, all the anxiety fell from his mind as he thought that if Milo was this late, he wasn’t going to show up at all. Alistair, having no other plans that evening other than light studying, removed his contact lenses and changed into his pyjamas. He used to wear department store Christmas card-style pyjamas, dressing like a twee illustration. His first night at Harrow, seeing all the common boys in t-shirts and sweatpants, was a lesson in ridicule. He stuffed the blue silk pyjamas his mother packed him in the bin.

Milo would be back in his own room by now. Alistair had no idea what it looked like. Daddy had made a beeline towards Seb’s room without considering he wouldn’t be granted his every request, dumbstruck with indignity when he was called Mr Richards by the porter. The correct assignment had been sent out the week before, but it’s not like Daddy ever checked the postbox himself. 

He assumed a bland utilitarian thing built to squeeze as many students in as possible despite any detriment to their human rights. Pristine white walls and rentable microwaves. Got to make Oxford as modern as possible so the townies don’t feel like serfs. He imagined Milo scrunching himself up to type out bosh on his laptop.

Although not considering himself discriminating when it comes to politics, Alistair liked to think he wouldn’t be friends with smug assholes. _They’re like us only cleverer?_ What the actual fuck? He had only been trying to educate Lauren so she would look stupid in front of someone who would be less sympathetic. It wasn’t his fault she didn’t know anything about her own school. 

It made him cringe whenever he thought back to that day. There was a chance, a real strong chance he and Milo could have been friends if Lauren hadn’t butted in, flirting with the subtlety of a burlesque dancer, then their tute sessions could be a fun tussle of intellect instead of the battles on the war front of England’s societal future. 

Alistair liked talking politics with someone who disagreed with him, liked getting to demolish his opponent’s argument - a sense of satisfaction like nothing else, all the work of study and analysis paying off in layer upon snow-thick smothering layer of language, planned and assembled as sturdy as the Parthenon - but there was no fun to be had if he saw his opponent as an enemy and vice versa. They would dig their heels firmly in the sand not realising it was quick. 

Too embittered for a lad, Mum said about him, switching off _The Andrew Marr Show_ and only giving him back the remote after he insisted he was just interested in the musical bits at the end.

Under his hands, the pages of A Clockwork Orange slid into ripples and when finally he stopped squeezing the book so hard, the creases, scaring the text into incomprehensibility, were crisscrossed in a replica of cracks on a punched mirror. 

He dropped the book. There was a knock on the door. Shave and a haircut, five bob.

Without a beckoning answer, the knob spun and Milo entered, dopey grin below his nose as if it had been stitched there. He cuffed up the small steps that led to the landing.

“Sorry I’m late. My class was still in Manor, and it’s ridiculous the distance you live from it. How d’you get there every week?”

Milo swung his bag off his shoulder and began rooting through it until he pulled out a frayed spiral notebook, bits of paper spilled out from between the pages. “Oh brilliant,” he said when he noticed the stack of Tory-related literature Alistair had piled on his desk. “You’ve got this all planned out haven’t you?”

Alistair gaped as Milo made himself comfortable in Alistair’s desk chair, flicking through his collection of laws, _1814-1914_ , the cover proclaimed in blue leathery print. Milo had scraped off his shoes at the entrance, a pair of high-top trainers engraved with mud on their soles, a flurry of dirt clumps showering onto Alistair’s clean floors. It wouldn’t be cleaned until tomorrow and he would have to walk across it in his bare feet in the morning when he went to brush his teeth.

He dragged his armchair over noisily, hoping Milo would turn and feel bad with how he was displacing Alistair’s energy. 

The wriggling impatient feeling in his stomach sunk lower and lower until it had retreated almost completely by the time he sat down.

“So,” Milo said, sliding the collection over to Alistair, “tell me what I need to know.”

Hefting his glasses off the ball of his nose, Alistair opened to the first page. “I guess we'll start at the beginning.”

Milo was an attentive student. They didn’t share any classes together besides the tute sessions so Alistair hadn’t the chance to see Milo actually learn. Hunching forward, inner cheek chewing, pencil doing acrobatics around fingers learning. The physical concern falling away to the cerebral rigor of sucking up information as if through a straw, the remains rattling around at the bottom of the cup and tempting.

Rough and eager with the books, whenever Alistair pointed out a snippet of legislation or political correspondence that would be useful as a quotation, Milo planted his hand square on the page to trace out the words as his remaining hand copied them down on paper. And this made Alistair fall back in his chair. Not only for the scrape of their skin against one another but the enthusiasm with which Milo fell back into his, evidently rejoicing at the perfection of the quote.

He was patient too. Periodically, Alistair slipped away from educator mode to try and catch a sneer. _What a dumbshit move: Labour could’ve averted that crisis, saved those lives, won that war._ But that never happened. He was impassive, cool as the proverbial cucumber, withholding judgment until he had the facts down in his snaky, scribbly hand in that tattered notebook. 

Was this what it was like to be a teacher? Watching the sun slowly rise behind a student’s eyes? Alistair wasn’t in a position to see his own expression in a mirror or on the polished surface of the table but did he have the same half-smile he caught their tutor wearing when his and Milo’s debates seemed to knit together as perfectly as the teeth of a zipper?

Ask me questions, Alistair longed privately, prove to me you’re as ignorant as I think you are. Ask me questions so I can hear confusion for once in your disaffected voice.

The few questions Milo asked were of clarification, not misunderstanding or missing the point. 

Clever questions: “So what you’re saying is…, right?” “Oh, like when…, right?” He reframed things to be simpler than Alistair explained them to be, in a plainclothes tongue, so a baby could understand. Alistair thought he understood better when his words were fed back to him as arranged by Milo.

And finally: “Is that it?”

Startled, Alistair whipped his head to the question. He had only just finished illuminating the circumstances of David Cameron’s career and was about to dive into his foreign policy defeats. 

“It’s just this feels like slippery territory, you know, for us.” Milo gestured to the space between them as if Alistair was an idiot. 

“If you’re satisfied it can be.” His hand hovered under the cover of _The Younger: A Child Prodigy_ , ready to flip it shut and insert it back in its place of honor on his shelf.

“Oh yes, more than. You’ve been really helpful, but could I have another look at that?” Milo pointed at the biography. Alistair shrugged and slid it over to him. Flipping to the bibliography, Milo took hurried and unfocused notes of the sources as if the book was melting away and with it all copies of its history. 

“You can borrow it if you want.”

His dark head perked up. “Can I?”

“Obviously.”

”Thanks,” Milo said, a little breathlessly, as he hefted it by one end rather brutally, examining his luck. The threads of the spine strained, the sound of a rip, as the front cover flopped down and the pages flapped about as uselessly as ducks with their wings in oil.

“Just don’t break it,” Alistair said, teeth gritted. “That’s my favorite one.”

Milo paused. A smile grew up his cheeks. “How many biographies of William Pitt have you read to have a favorite?”

“I read one: it was shit. So, I read a second one and it was-”

“Less shit?”

“Incredibly.”

“Good to know.” Milo nodded, the same soft sneer gracing his mouth as he bent back over his notebook.

Heat filled Alistair’s head. “I know other books you can borrow, if you want. They’re probably more encompassing than this one. And you should take the laws too, for the primary sources.”

“I knew I called on the right Scruton.”

“Scruton’s a philosopher, not a historian. You’re thinking Ferguson.”

“Again, proving exactly why I need you.”

Despite himself, Alistair laughed. He snagged a Post-it off the pack on his desk and popped the cap from a pen and copied down the titles Milo might find useful. Their arms worked together in the near-silence of a testing environment, nibs roving stationary, throats clearing mannerly.

The Post-it got stuck on the back cover over the quote from The New York Review of Books: “Captivating...Cushway electrifies Pitt’s life with the verve of a peerless poet and an unmatched historian. He makes Pitt breathe, and we breathe alongside him.”

Reclining, he adjusted his glasses higher on his nose and watched Milo scribble. Even though he was writing in pencil (mechanical, glittery orange, fin snapped off) he scratched out mistakes rather than waste the time to flip the tool around to erase. It was admirable he was writing everything out by hand, wasn’t taking the easy way out by typing on a laptop or photographing the text with his phone. Like a proper eager Oxford man. Minus the actual penmanship. Alistair wouldn’t be able to decipher what he wrote with a microscope.

Milo gnawed a stray piece of skin off his lip and Alistair wanted to give him a glass of water.

In a rare moment of pause, while Milo was shaking out the cramps in his hand, Alistair said, “I’ve got Scruton on my bookshelf if you want to know who he actually is.”

Milo shrugged, but inclined his head towards the bookshelf so Alistair pushed off to collect the two volumes he kept perpetually earmarked.

Milo accepted the books undubiously. “Flirt,” he said as he read the cover of _Sexual Desire_ , “Oh, and _How to Be a Conservative_? Surely you of all people don’t need a manual.”

“But you do. Deal: you try this and I promise you I’ll pick up _Das Kapital_.”

“Fuck off Ryle,” Milo said cheerfully. “You should be reading Marx anyway.”

“Reading it, not so much believing it. Coming to class with a communist flag tucked in your pocket is enough to see which side of Europe you’d rather be living in.”

Alistair leaned against the desk, his arms crossed as Milo rolled his eyes.

“Do you really think I’d bring a communist flag to a session?”

“To piss me off you might.”

He meant it mostly as a joke but Milo scoffed. “Well, I didn’t. It was for assassin.”

“What’s that? Are you roleplaying Luigi Lucheni or whatever?”

“It’s a game. Just a silly game. You get a list of names and you have to go around finding ways to mock-kill people, Nerf guns, talcum powder as Anthrax. It’s run by the Assassins’ Guild soc, y’know, like the group in Discworld. Lauren thought it would be fun to play.”

At the mention of Lauren’s name, Alistair was suspended in the midst of a swallow, and when he recovered himself his throat smarted. “Yes, and what does any of that have to do with your affinity for the extreme left politics?”

“A cock-up. The lists of victims the soc e-mailed out had repeat names so once you’re killed you have to have a red handkerchief so anyone else trying to hunt you knows you’re already dead.”

Alistair nodded. “So you’re dead. Can I ask how? Or is that too intimate?”

“Matt Barney, on St. Cross Road, with the cardboard knife; he slit my throat, pretty early on too; I hadn’t gotten anybody on my list. Lauren’s doing good though; she’s gotten six people so far. She started with water balloons as bombs but a random told the committee that their Angora sweater got wet and the powers that be told her she had to find a different method.”

“What does she use now?”

“She bought a little Thor’s hammer toy and is using it to bash people’s heads in.”

Milo was all very chipper recounting this, reveling in Lauren’s ability to play a child’s game well. Might as well let students have their phantasy of revolution before they have to get sensible; Alistair didn’t mind that no one had told him of it before.

The lenses of Alistair’s glasses were perfectly clean so he took them off and polished them on the hem of his shirt, the world going filmy and the only necessary thing he needed to look at was his glasses, understandably not meeting Milo’s eye as he spoke.

“You two got along very well during freshers’ week.” He scrubbed at an invisible mark.

“Yeah.”

“Anything ever come of it? You’re obviously still in touch with each other.”

“Yeah. We-” Milo lent forward and rubbed an eye, “We hooked up a couple weeks ago. Nothing came of it though.”

Alistair replaced his glasses on his nose. “Sorry to hear it; you got along well it seemed.”

“We’re still friends,” Milo said with a twinge of annoyance.

“Yeah,” Alistair said defensively.

“Yeah.”

Making it worse, Alistair said, “I had to break up with my girlfriend over the summer. She was having her gap year in Ghana, building wells and things like that, and then she was going to Trinity. In Dublin,” he added lamely.

“Yeah. Cool.” Milo was checking his watch when he let his hand drop like a stone. “You have a gap year then?”

“No,” Alistair said. “I did summer classes at St. Andrews though, spent a lot of time at the beach reading Machiavelli. What about you?”

“Me and two mates went to China over the summer. Hiking, hostels, the usual. It was pretty fun. We’re thinking of doing the same this year in either Peru or Chile; somewhere in South America so we can have an excuse to stop over in the US.”

“Cool. What made you ask? If I had a gap year.”

A shrug. “Dunno really. You seem older so I guess I thought you had a year on me.”

“Now you have no excuse.”

A crack of a smile, revealing perfect teeth. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Just that I wouldn’t have needed any help on an essay about Labour’s history.”

“You wouldn’t have asked even if you did.” The smile disappeared behind his lips, red and plump from so much biting. “That’s the problem with you. You never admit when you’re beat, which have been, by me for instance, several times, but you never lift your feet, just keep letting yourself get pushed.”

Wrinkles formed between Alistair’s eyebrows. He crossed his arms, swinging his chin haughtily. “I do. I do a lot actually.”

“Not to me. You’ve gone far enough to argue for the fuck-ups of imperialism just because I was arguing against it.”

“It’s called playing devil’s advocate.”

“It’s not devil’s advocate when you believe the devil is in the right. You’re not taking those positions to help me iron out my arguments. There’s absolutely no threshold you won’t consider crossing; I’ve been afraid to bring up World War II for weeks because you might start telling me Oswald Mosley wasn’t all bad because he didn’t like classism and because, hey, even MacMillian agreed with his economics.”

The silence immediately afterward was filled by the sound of Alistair scratching his head. His stomach felt as if it had fallen twenty stories. Not the pleasant roller-coaster feeling of normal debate but something medical, a scroll of tumor twisting around in his belly.

“Can I at least thank you for not thinking I’d say anything nice about Hitler?”

“You can. But seriously Alistair, you-- you act this way with everyone who disagrees with you and can’t do that. It’s not realistic.”

“This coming from the bloke who called me a fascist two weeks ago for saying Thatcher was right to close down unprofitable coal mines.”

“Not all the ones she closed were unprofitable and frankly her worst slight was refusing to negotiate with the unions whilst comparing them unfavorably to a country we were actually at war with.”

“Opposition whether it is foreign or domestic is still opposition that threatens the stability of the nation. And to think someone as liberal as you wouldn’t support the closure of coal mines, not pumping smoke all in the air-”

“Alright! We’re not going over this again.” Milo let his head fall into his hands, squashing a groan to his palms. When he emerged, running his hand down his face so Alistair could see the blood under his eyelids, he said, “Maybe we both have a problem.”

“But you were the first to admit it so you win?” At Milo’s grim expression, poised for another poor lecture, Alistair said, looking at the floor, “Kidding.”

“It’s that we’re not studying to be political pundits; the course is History and Politics. We’re meant to be chronicling history, when we get into fights over what was right and wrong and who’s right and wrong we lose sight of our purpose.”

“You say that as if historians don’t themselves argue on history. Some people still think the Earl of Oxford is Shakespeare; some people think Lenin was a good leader.”

“He did legalise homosexuality and abortion decades before England.”

“And sent thousands to the gulag but at least gays aren’t being shot alongside the starving dissidents. Well, they probably are, just not for being gay.” Before Milo could speak, his mouth already forming his counter, Alistair held up his hand. “The course isn’t designed to make me - us - into Camerons and Corbyns, naturally, it wasn’t advertised as How to be a Politician 101, but that is the result I want. This course is my map to that; I want to be a politician, maybe you don’t and that’s fine; be a historian, read the accounts, write books: that’s not me. I know myself well enough to know that twiddling my thumbs in the backroom isn’t how I want to do things, change things. I want a constituency and I want to be in Parliament because even though you think my positions are shit, they’ve proven themselves ten times over.”

Milo opened his mouth again then swiftly shut it, flexing his jaw really, though Alistair could just about hear the latest would-be witticism slosh around his head. _Ten times is right, only ten. Of all Tories, you want to be a Cameron?_ Something something change courses. He nodded. 

“I want to be a politician too,” Milo said at last. Olive branch. Once Alistair took it he’d hang it on his wall where his boater never was. He kneaded his closed eyes until, when he took his hands away, the skin around them was red. Not able to look Milo in the eye, not able to even look at his face, Alistair swallowed down the crack in his voice.

“I look forward to seeing you leading the opposition. Really. You’d be really good at it. You’re good at it now.”

The cone of Alistair’s elbow was suddenly covered with something warm, something that went tight before vanishing.

“Thanks.” He should really copyright that smile, Alistair thought, not being able to resist one glance as he fell back into his chair, the hair on his forehead raising in zero-gravity before it smacked back down. He threw his legs up onto the desk. 

He wanted Milo to look at his legs, see as much of his body as possible. His relentless body. His feet in the sand.

Alistair whipped his legs off the desk as soon as the thought spoke fully in his mind. Playing it off that he didn’t want to muss the papers, the ink on the papers. 

“Do you have anywhere else to be tonight?”

“A lecture on Heidegger and how his philosophy relates to the Nazis.”

“Lucky you.” 

“But I thought I’d skip it. I got a mate in the class who can give me her notes tomorrow. My essay’s ten, fifteen, percent of my grade for the class, a substantial number like that.” He gave Alistair a friendly slug in the arm. “So yeah, lucky me. But my professor’s absolute shit so best not to leave all the stress to her.”

“Fuck. Need a drink?”

“A drink?”

Alistair was heavily grateful he was not genetically disposed to blush because otherwise he would be red as a Christmas bauble. He got up and rooted under his bed, producing a bottle of Casa Noble Sebastian sent him from Mexico, the blue bottle like a prop from a hag’s cabin. _pollunated by fking bats!!! love you mate_ , the card had said in Seb’s trademark lounging penmanship. The reusable water bottle was a dishonorable place to serve it in but it was all he had in terms of glass. Milo accepted the drink gladly. 

“Well,” Alistair said when he regained his seat, “don’t withhold the name. If he’s so shit let me avoid him.”

“Theory of Politics. Avoid Eric Posenby at all costs.”

“I have him for Practical Ethics; I love him.”

“You can’t be serious. He teaches at double-time like he’s afraid the clock’s going to bite him in the ass. And stonefaced the entire time. Never cracks a smile let alone a joke. Acts as if anytime not spend thinking about Thomas Hobbes is time wasted.”

“That’s the best part: cut the fat, give me the facts. If I want a friend I’ll go to the pub; I don’t need my professor to be one. But my Women’s and Queer History teacher-”

“You’re taking a gender studies class?” Incredulity. What a dickhead.

Alistair rolled his eyes. “It was a required credit. Thought if I have to might as well stop myself up with more history, but anyway the woman who teaches it, she looks directly at me whenever she talks about male oppression and it’s like, ma’am the witch trials in sixteenth-century Germany were not my fault.”

“My history teacher in fourth year was the same way. We didn’t have any girls in the class then and it felt very much us against her. I think she got a different job at Monmouth the year after.”

“God I hate women like that. How do they even make it through the world when they think about it so cynically? I’ll see her waiting at the kerb and just like ‘throw yourself into the road darling; you haven’t got a chance.’ ”

“Chin chin,” Milo said, raising his bottle. There was no Richard Grant archness to him; Milo was soft as an oft-handled eraser.

“Oh, lovely. When’d you first see it?” Alistair asked, throat harsh in the aftermath of the tequila. “I was eight. Probably too young but that’s what you get with an older brother with a VCR in his room.”

“Oh my days that’s much earlier than me; I was sixteen, makes you wonder how I survived so long without it.”

“A good enough age. If you haven’t seen _Withnail and I_ by eighteen, I don't think you’re even allowed into Oxford.”

Milo nodded sagely. “My babysitter was the one who turned me on to it and my sister got so mad at her because she, my babysitter, had said it was a period drama. At the first utterance of ‘cunt’ she was running upstairs and threatening to call our mum and dad.” Milo wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve, wiped the tapered laughter up the sides of his face. 

“You had a babysitter at sixteen?”

“My ex-babysitter at that point. We were on holiday with her family. She made it a treat for us after we were brave enough to go parasailing.”

“Parasailing? Where?”

“We were in Gibraltar. It was two summers ago: my sister and my brother and me and our babysitter, Bea, were on the beach, taking a walk and all that, and we saw this little stand advertising for it so we said why not to each other and went. It doesn’t feel that high once you’re up there. When we met up for dinner with our parents Fergie was livid we hadn’t texted her and we all took another turn the following day.”

“Fergie, like the Duchess of York?” he said offhandedly. He wasn’t expecting Milo to blush. Alastair balked and repeated himself, his teeth ground together to prevent his jaw from dropping to the floor, “Like the _Duchess of York_?”

“Yes,” Milo admitted in a small voice.

“And you’re friends with her how?”

“Her daughter used to babysit me.”

“Which daughter?” This was starting to feel like an interrogation; Alistair was barely able to contain his stupefaction, waiting for Milo to burst into laughter and confess the joke.

“Bea. Atrice. She used to come round to take care of me and my siblings when our parents were out. She stopped when she started uni but we still saw each other often enough.”

After years of seeing Princess Beatrice on the cover of tabloids in ridiculous hats and modest shin-length dresses, it was hard to picture her on a speedboat in a bikini, hair mismatched by the wind, her gawking teeth and tarsier eyes sparkling up at the speck of a teenaged Milo in the air. It was even harder to think of Milo, Sir Richards, gussied into tails and snapping his chin down when the queen potters past him in the ballroom.

“At charity galas and royal receptions I imagine.”

“Yes.”

“Miles,” Alistair said tightly, “what exactly are you?”

“A _homo sapien_ if you’d like to get specific but my father’s an earl so technically that makes me his son.”

Clapping a hand over his eyes, Milo’s face going dark, Alistair restrained a groan. “I can’t believe this. I literally-- You act so middle-class.”

“Well don’t say it like it's a bad thing.”

“I’m not; I think the middle class is boldly necessary. But you-- I never would have guessed. Do you consciously not tell people that?”

“It’d be dickish if I introduced myself as ‘Hi, Milo, earllson’; my arse would be kicked several times over this month alone. If someone asks,” he gestured to Alistair, “directly, I tell them but when the question’s more general ‘where are you from, where’d you grow up, where’d you go to school’ I go just as general: London. Which is the truth. I don’t feel the need to let people make judgments about me all from a single word. That because of who my parents are and what that implies I’ll be a snob and a massive asshole. People, if they’re the kind of people who I’d want to be friends with, don’t ask me where I went to school as their first point of contact; they usually have the decency to ask me what I’m studying first.” 

He fell back in his chair, out of breath, face almost steaming with Alistair couldn’t discern as anger or embarrassment or just exhaustion. The words had been a fist, and a fist after fist. Whether they had been intended for him or for the British class structure, they still fell solid, packed down clods of dirt hurled over the fence.

“I don’t need to ask that.”

“No, I suppose _you_ don’t.” 

Alistair took a drink. The fire of tequila hurt a lot less than Milo. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s good drink,” Milo said contritely. “Thank you.”

“Didn’t think you’d be aristocracy. You dress like an advertisement for Oxfam.”

“I like these clothes.”

“They aren’t bad,” Alistair said in a rush. 

“It’s not white tie but it’s not bad.”

“My days. An earl’s son reduced to the status of a bum.”

By now it was half-past seven and Alistair had remembered his dinner plans: grab a sandwich from the dining hall and eat it in front of _Battleship Potemkin_ , which he had yet to watch for his Cinema Studies class then fit in a few chapters of this book he had on The Troubles before going to bed. He didn’t want to ask Milo to leave though. So he didn’t make him.

“Do you want to get dinner now?” Milo asked. “I don’t mind if you want to.”

“Sure.”

Alistair considered changing for one fleeting moment but he didn’t want to hold Milo up.

“It’s late isn’t it,” Milo said, squeezing on his trainers. “When do you usually eat? I must have held you up.”

“You haven’t,” Alistair protested, then admitted, “Six, usually.”

Milo delayed in tightening his laces to look up. “Wow, sorry. We have to go at once then.”

“You want to get dinner together?”

“Yeah, I’ll pay if you want to go off-campus.”

“You don’t have to do that.” Alistair shook his head, smiling. “I was going to eat in the hall anyway.”

“Then I’ll carry your plate.”

The evening was warm. A curt breeze blew now and again, batting at the legs of Alistair’s sweatpants, the elastic-banded ruffs tight above his plimsolls. They chatted as they traveled through the halls and down the stairs and over the lawns. This and that. Alistair had, through mentioning his childhood interest in tennis, gotten Milo to share that he had been a ball boy for the Nadal-Federer match at 2008 Wimbledon and missed meeting both of them afterward because he and a mate left early with the two hundred forty pounds they made between them to take the ball girls out for knickerbocker glories.

“It was pure sanctuary in the ice cream shop, like Antarctica. The air conditioning made the sweat on our necks freeze in place. We were all still in our uniforms and looked like we had come from an intense practice, all red faces. Jack and me tried to impress them by tying the cherry stems in our mouths. Our parents caught up to us, off the wall pissed we had spoiled dinner, and after we had showered we all went to see _The Dark Knight_ and it was the best day of summer. Lila and I kissed throughout half the show so I had to buy another ticket a week later when it got good reviews.”

In the dining hall, Milo was good to his word and had Alistair find them a seat on the benches while he absconded to the next room. When he returned, rounding the corner from where the modernist buffets were segregated from the stained glass windows and glazed oak long tables and ten-foot-tall portraits of kings in blue, Milo had two plates balanced on his arms. Unable to bear being useless, Alistair fetched water from the cooler tanks set up on the side of the room, an allowance of modernity, he thought as he released the silver tab and bubbles wobbled to the top of the glass like a pod of whales surfacing for air. 

“You didn’t have to do that,” Milo said as he took his first sip, from a sobering beverage, of the night.

“I like to help.”

With an impish grin seemly brought on by nothing - Alistair smiled back uncertainly, afraid he had missed a joke - Milo slowly extended his arm and dragged Alistair’s glasses from his nose, sliding them on, wearing the pair better than Alistair ever did. 

“Try helping now,” he said charmingly as he dodged Alistair’s snatching arm. Milo wrested Alistair still, his breath billowing out into his eyes. “How do I look?”

“I don’t know. I can’t see you.”

“Nice to know you have one weakness.”

“I’m getting LASIK once I’ve saved up enough.” He groped towards the smear of Milo’s face and jammed them back on his nose.

“Let me chip in. We can’t let you be so susceptible.” 

Their side by side plates of kidney pie and yellowtail sushi were swapped and reswapped so many times they forgot who had started with what and after they had cleaned those plates Alistair got up to grab them slices of Battenberg cake, the checker pattern of cream white and pink falling to bits under their forks. Alistair critiqued every dish mercilessly, justifying it when he explained his grandmother graduated from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris at which Milo countered his grandmother was in the same class as Mary Berry. “Not that she ever had to cook a day in her life.”

Suddenly Milo slapped the back of his head. “What the fuck?” he exclaimed, looking over his shoulder. Alistair looked too and saw a girl with blue and ginger plaits leap from the table behind them. She bounded up to Milo, twirling a plastic straw around her fingers.

“Poison dart,” she said in a Brummie accent. “List please.”

“No killing indoors, Gemma. Didn’t you read the rules?” Milo scraped the spitball out of his hair and glared at the girl who was storing the straw behind her ear. She waved away his concerns.

“Abraham Lincoln was shot in a theater, whys it matter if I kill you in the dining hall?”

“So I can eat in peace maybe? Anyway, Matt killed me on Tuesday so you’re too late.”

“What! That’s so unfair; you aren’t wearing your bandana.” She crossed her arms and pushed out a sparkly bottom lip. 

“Actually.” Milo shifted his weight off one buttock and whipped out his devotion to Lenin like Gemma was the surrendered Reichstag. He caught Alistair’s eye, winked at him. 

_Commie_ , Alistair mouthed.

“You have to wear it visibly, obviously. I don’t have x-ray vision into your ass.”

“Still doesn’t void the rules, Gem. Go eat.”

“Fine,” she said, flicking a braid out of her face, “but you have to put your bandana on. S’only fair after all. If I don’t get your list.”

Milo, shaking his head, spun the thing into a ribbon and tied it around his head like in a Rambo style. “Happy?”

Gemma smirked. “You look like Rosie the Riveter.”

“Get out,” Milo said.

“So long Rosie.” Gemma giggled, flouncing back to her seat.

Milo stabbed at his slice of cake; the icing fell off in one thick hunk which Milo scooped into his mouth, disgusting Alistair.

“You’re really the Rosie the Riveter,” he said to Alistair. “Your hair’s curlier than mine.”

“Give it here then.”

Milo hooked his thumb under the knot and swept the bandana off his head and with two hand-fitted it over Alistair’s cranium, smashing the tip of his nose down, the shiny skin behind his lower lip exposed briefly, until the bandana was loose around his neck and Milo started the whole thing over again by pulling the front so it sat on his hairline.

The entire time the knuckles of Milo’s thumbs dug into Alistair’s face, leaving residual ache where they had rubbed against cheek and temple bones. 

“Ah,” Milo moved back to admire his handiwork, “now you’re ready to defeat the Reich.”

Alistair wore it for the rest of dinner; he wore it while he told Milo about what it was like trying to study at St. Andrews with Americans reenacting _Chariots of Fire_ on the beach; he wore it while he told Milo that he had been thinking about returning to Scotland for Christmas to stay with a don he had befriended; he wore it while he told Milo how that don was embittered by the lack of Greek and Latin in the general state school curriculum. He barely noticed how Milo had sunk his teeth into his bottom lip to seal in a laugh at how casually Alistair wore the bandana like an Alice band until Milo swept it off of him and stopped up his back pocket with it, the missing pressure disorienting Alistair for the minute it took to stack their dishes and put them in the outgoing washing pile.

Naturally, they returned to his room, Milo had left his things there and was obligated to wait very close as Alistair unlocked his door. Jokes flew that it wasn’t ‘my’ room as Alistair said but ‘our’ room, assigned to Milo and gifted selflessly.

Inside, Milo went straight for the tequila bottle and poured them both another drink. An expanding lightness filled Alistair’s head as he drank. He let Milo sit on his bed while he sat in the guest’s spot. He felt reckless and personal. 

“Can I show you something?” 

In a manila envelope, the kind where you have to wind twine around a button for closure, that was slid underneath a puzzle of _Primavera_ Alistair had yet to solve was a fat stack of photographs. They were cyanotypes and silver gelatin and gelatin chloride and platinum prints of sizes from 4x5 to 8x10. On the backs of the photographs were their titles and lines of verse, Dickinson and Whitman, some whole poems were represented but the stanzas were split up, disorientated. Alistair had much of the words memorised out of context and felt violated when he read them in a study guide or when they were repeated in a pop song; it was the plucking of an exposed nerve; please be gentle, you’re playing a Stradivarius, not a Yamaha.

The packet that was a gift from his mum. 

There were no paintings on the walls when Alistair was growing up, only photographs. Fancy photographs, artsy photographs, important photographs. Kim Phuc snuggling with her baby, Richard Avedons, Anne Geddes. His mother became a collector when she stopped working to raise him and Sebastian, going to estate sales and consignment shops, bargaining over the telephone with sellers while she made beans on toast. She framed them and rearranged their positions over the sofa, behind his father’s head in the dining room. When she went back to work after Alistair turned ten the frames were less migratory, extinction of beauty was common as conventional holiday shots and school pictures were shown off in their place.

She would never throw anything away, and she would pull out pieces now and again and look at them with Alistair, explaining to him the techniques and the purpose of the pictures. 

Alistair got his particular set before while he was packing for Oxford. Mum had swept into his room with the envelope and said, “You like the blue ones, don’t you? Take these with you.”  
As he was straightening up, she fished one out and smiled. It was an old lady, her hair loose and shirt a baggy gingham, with a young man’s head seeking comfort on her shoulder. “This one’s you and me.”

The photographs went between folded pairs of jeans, unobserved until his first night at Oxford when he left the dining hall before pudding and in a fit of early on-set homesickness spun the twine off the envelope and sorted through the pictures. 

They had an undeniable air of stillness, the unpeopled ones of flowers in cut glass bowls, wicker chairs beneath rectangles of sun, felt as though not even the photographer had been around to witness them. Of all the portraits, there were just two pairs of eyes shown, everyone else seemed to be waiting to fall asleep, knowing nothing would be solved during dreams but, regardless, wanting a truce with ill life. They made Alistair feel blue. A melancholic wanderlust to enter the pacific environment, because they all had to be of one universe, and lay his head down in total peace on the clean wooden tables and naked backs of the subjects.

Reading up on the artist, John Dugdale his mother had written on the envelope with a fine Sharpie, Alistair found he lived in an eighteenth-century farmhouse in the south of New York he renovated himself, that he lived by kerosene lamp until he was forced by circumstance to wire electricity, that he bathed outdoors in a tin basin in the summer, plays the piano; he owned a dog named Juno; he was a Gemini, and despite being HIV positive in the eighties, suffering viral meningitis, viral pneumonia, a stroke, and cancer, he was still alive. Still alive and all but blind in his left eye and took photos as a career.

Alistair looked at John’s pictures and wanted to stroll through the amber waves of grain of Thoreau’s chosen America. He felt less solitary knowing there was someone who valued the old like he did and wanted to sustain it.

“Sure.”

Alistair retrieved the packet and slid out the photos. He passed them to Milo with the reverence a priest has when he places the body of Christ on a parishioner’s tongue. Don’t eat it; let it dissolve into you.

He regretted not sitting next to Milo so he could see what he saw but moving now would be an intrusion and he muzzled his impatience, studying Milo’s face for the tiniest of disturbances.

“These are good,” Milo said at last. “Did you take them?”

“Um, no. They’re Dugdale’s.” Alistair was worried he would slip off his chair, he was sitting so far off the edge. “My mum gave them to me. She collects pictures and they were her gift to me for getting into Oxford.”

“Your mum gave you this?” Milo flipped a picture toward him. _Comrades_ , two men with their backs to the camera, their head declined toward one another, an arm around a shoulder, an arm around a waist; their buttocks like a tetrad of satellites. 

Alistair smiled. There was enough good humor to Milo that he felt no fear of attack. He leaned back in his chair comfortably.

“You should have seen the ones she gave my brother. Francesca Woodman. A bunch of really beautiful but really weird nudes. He was absolutely terrified of them; he thought she was trying to scare him straight off vaginas.”

Milo nodded, but he was reading the back of the photo. He cleared his throat. 

“ _Mon enfant! I give you my hand!_

_I give you my love, more precious than money,_

_I give you myself, before preaching or law;_

_Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?_

_Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?_

Did you write that?”

“You’re giving me far too much credit tonight. It’s Whitman. All the pictures had a bit written on the back; they’re all inspired by different poems.”

“And the title: _Comrades_ ,” he read. “Was that you? Marxist.”

“Marxist-Leninist, excuse you. Accuse me at least as being the more successful ideology if you must accuse at all.”

Milo let the sides of his mouth quirk up in a quick smile before pivoting the picture back toward himself and contemplating it deeper. “These are really beautiful. To think all these people are dead now,” he said wistfully.

“They shouldn’t be. They were taken in, oh, the nineties, the eighties?”

“Really?”

“I thought the same. It’s just an old technique. The blue.” 

“Hmm.” The sound came out thoughtfully as Milo read the snatches of poems. His eyes had a far-away luster to them and Alistair watched as they moved back and forth along the stanzas while he nursed at the teat of the whisky bottle, slipping slowly into intoxication as an old man slips into death.

“I’m glad I got these over the Woodmans,” _with their terrible breasts and ghosts_. They frightened him too, the product of a deteriorating woman, and was glad they were away from his mother. 

“ _With Blue -_

_uncertain stumbling Buzz -_

_Between the light -_

_and me -_

_And then the Windows failed -_

_and then I could not see to see_.”

“Are you going to recite poetry to me all evening? I can find you the whole works if you want them.”

“Could you?” He said eagerly, whipping his head up.

“Whitman and Dickinson. _Complete Works_.” Alistair canted his head towards the bookshelf, too liquid to get them himself. Milo got up; he ran his fingers along all the spines until they landed on the right titles.

“I’m going to have enough to start my own library by the time I leave you. Oh, wow; heavy,” he said as the thick volumes fell into his arms. “Guess I know why your arms are the way they are.”

“It’s cheaper to buy omnibuses.”

“Didn’t think you had to worry about money.”

“Despite how I may appear, my family is very recently descended from the middle-class. When the 10th Earl of Whatsit was eating peacock jelly and swan pie, Old Johnny Ryle was probably slaving away over a potato tenancy.”

“You’re lying,” Milo said, sitting back down and flipping through the books.

“This time, I swear I’m not. My great-grandfather was on the dole until he was thirty.“ Before he started at the bank, he could’ve added. “And both my parents still work.”

“That doesn’t count. And anyway your brother went to Eton. You went to Harrow.”

Alistair tapped the side of his head; his movements were soupy and when he was done, his hand collapsed to the arm of the chair in relief. “Exhibitions do wonders for those unable to afford complete fees. We didn’t get into Oxford on the strength of our names.” 

Milo looked at the books in what seemed like shame, his eyes stagnant on the page. And perhaps it was the pages themselves that attributed to his shame more so than the spoken truth. The books were cheap. Secondhand. The covers were warped daguerreotypes of their authors and the typeface was cramped and bold. The matter of those words, printed unambiguously, had more veracity than Alistair’s claims of comparative poverty, words in the air that only existed in memory now, the sound of Alistair’s voice, his inflections, even the order of the words and what word they were being eroded as recollection lapped at them like waves drawing sand from the shore and into the depths, its grit to be confused with salt already living there.

“I mean our father attended before either of us so maybe there was a bit of nepotism with it,” Alistair said hurriedly.

“I’m sure you weren’t,” Milo was quick to respond. Very kind of him despite it being a lie.

“What’s it like? Being the son of a peer.”

A squint bent to the photos, scrolled through ones it had seen before

“Do you take any pictures yourself?”

“My Instagram’s shit, if that’s what you mean.” Alistair shook his head sadly. Diversion always annoyed him in conversation but he thought it wise not to lap at this particular sore. Maybe later Milo would share willingly. Alistair hoped he would be that lucky. “Just a fan. Mum gave me a Samsung but the only thing I ever caught on it was a sunset right after I took it out of the box. It looked better in real life than it did in the picture.”

“Take a picture of me.”

“You don’t want that.”

“Try me.” Running a hair through his hair, combing out the bumps, Milo sat up straighter, his shoulders shook out of their slump. “Come on. I’ve thought of auditioning for _A Winter’s Tale_ and I need a headshot.” 

Acquiesced, the camera, excavated from a nest of used-up pens, fit Milo into its crosshairs. Zoom in, adjust focus, too close, zoom out, perfect, the perfect bust of a portrait. “Say cheese.” 

“Camembert.” Big smile; one might say unprofessional for a headshot.

“Want to see it?”

Milo nodded approvingly as he examined the tiny square of screen. He flicked his head up. “My turn.”

“Don’t,” Alistair protested but it was too late, the click and the white starburst of flash drowned him out.

“Not too bad,” Milo said though he sounded dubious. “How about another one for good luck?”

If only to placate him, lips in a line, the commissure of his mouth set deep the same way if he were smiling, arms crossed, Alistair allowed a second picture and quickly reappropriated the camera once the dizziness of the flash wore off. He lingered by the window, in the deep enclave that was bracketed by so many wood panels like hundreds of little doors. The stars were out by now, snowflakes on a felt sheet, like Wilson Bently photographs.

“You act like my little brother,” Milo said as he settled back on Alistair’s bedspread, fingering the pattern. “He hates getting his picture taken. I think he wants no record of his puberty to exist, not that I blame him. But you turn out a lot better on camera than he does.” 

“I am a younger brother,” Alistair said defensively.

“That’s right. This was your brother’s room, your dad said.”

“Indeed. And my dad’s and my cousin Robert’s.”

“Looks like they should get around to putting a _Property of Ryle_ plaque over the door.”

“We’d pay goblets to make that happen. Would put a lot of pressure on my cousin Alfie; he’s next in line and is rather looking more at Cambridge.”

“The absolute gall of him.”

“I know. Hopeless Python fan. Wants to join the Footlights like nothing else. He’ll probably cave to his father and read Psychology. It would not be the first time a Ryle entered with a plan for art and exited with a degree in practically. Sort of went the other way around for Seb though.”

“Oh? What’s he up to nowadays?”

“He just got fired. Downsizing, you know. He was fine with it, he said. He hadn’t even wanted to go into banking but our father thought it was a better course than Chemistry. I told you our grandmother went to Le Cordon Bleu? Well, Seb wanted to do kitchen science. Just...didn’t work out.”

“Fuck. Shit of your dad to do that to him considering how it turned out.” Milo sounded genuinely sympathetic. He had never even met Seb but already was on his side. Nevermind Seb had spent most of his first year out of the stock exchange and on the streets of New York befriending the homeless, accosting the cast of _Kinky Boots_ at the stage door, and galavanting around the Lower East Side in a three-piece suit, just about begging to get robbed. A disloyal, lazy wanker who deserved to get fired, last in first out be damned.

Alistair scoffed, unable to dislodge the amount of phlegm Seb deserved. “Oh, don’t worry about Seb and Daddy. His little music festival gap year is being funded rather comfortably by our parents. Turns out once you clinch your degree you’re free to find yourself in the California desert with a cabal of hippies.”

“Sounds like a real cunt.”

Alistair stunned. He wouldn’t have believed such a word could ever be exchanged between them. A characteristic implike expression animated Milo’s face.

“I moved my bed over there,” Alistair said, jabbing his finger at Milo, “just so I wouldn’t be sleeping in the place he slept. Though, of course, the view’s better here.” Then, under his breath, “Figures Seb would have the instincts for interior design of all things. Feng shui and that bollix.” 

Milo, hearing him clearly, let out a sound somewhere between a laugh and a scoff. He tossed his head and shifted his weight, planting his hands behind him on the mattress. 

“The view’s pretty good from where I’m sitting.”

Alistair, at this point, would describe himself as twenty percent drunk. Drunk enough to know he shouldn’t get in the driver’s seat with the imbued confidence to know he would anyway because never would he admit that a few swigs of tequila could bring him low. Milo, in Alistair’s estimation, was not drunk at all and that frightened Alistair a considerable amount. 

Yet he drifted. 

Trying to look inconspicuous, he made a stop at his desk and picked up the Pitt biography, taking out the back flap from the pages where it had been used as a desperate bookmark. The author glamour short of Patrick Cushwell looked away from the camera mysteriously as directed by _(copyright)_ Alan Chin.

“Good book,” he said lamely.

“I’m looking forward to it.”

A glance told him Milo was following the very syrupy movements he was making, his gaze resting low as to be banal as possible, on Alistair’s bare feet, the tan lines from his summer flip-flops still drawn there. Feet that stepped closer, gathering dust on their soles.

Alistair stood in front of him, his hands in his pockets, very casual-like. Milo refused to look up yet, a half-smile playing about his lips, sporadic biting of the lips as well: upper teeth land on the organ then slowly retreat back into the mouth, leaving the Ruinart mouth with tracks of rosé. 

Milo had made himself extremely comfortable on Alistair’s bed; he wasn’t hanging off the side of it like a conventional first-time guest, too afraid of wrinkling the duvet to rest more than an inch of his arse on the bed. Not uncomfortable in the slightest. His knees formed a perfect right angle at the edge of the mattress. 

Not particularly knowing what he was doing, Alistair lifted one foot from the ground and placed his knee besides Milo’s hip then repeated the action swiftly with the other leg until he was fitted snugly on top of Milo, who, when he at last looked up, received Alistair’s lips. 

Milo’s hands ran up Alistair’s back and seized two handfuls of his t-shirt at the shoulder blades while his face was sandwiched between Alistair’s palms.

First, they were drunk about it. Puckering their lips and butting up against each other, letting sound waves ripple off with every disconnection - disappointment overwhelmed Alistair, already too swept up in lust to think about consequences, he wouldn’t have moved from the window if he had known kissing Milo would be so adolescent - until Milo took the back of Alistair's head and held him on his mouth.

Milo had opened his mouth to Alistair’s tongue at once. Alistair didn’t let himself play shy. Already warmth was traveling down his spine as they kissed, though that might have just been because Milo was following the trail of vertebrae to the small of his back and cupped his ass. He kneaded towards the center.

Inside Milo’s mouth, the world was warm. It was wet. A private fen. You couldn’t drown if you lay down in the water but, oh, did you want to. Let the water, fragrant with watercress and peat, fill your nose and your ears and your head until you were more it than you.

Presumably Milo had practiced at boarding school, in the triangular gap under the stairs, the smell of wood or metal depending on the age of the building, the halls silent, a hand debating with a zipper, gluey pieces of lip falling on his tongue like snowflakes, tasting of synthetic banana or candied Dr Pepper. Alistair could not reckon if Milo would have his hands on the body of a girl classmate, someone he met in the coed theatre department, or a boy classmate, a roommate sleeping thirty feet from him at night, undressing, showering, wanking, thirty feet away. Imagining Milo as a naughty schoolboy got Alistair hot. There was nowhere to go to keep his erection from prodding Milo in the stomach except for farther back on his palms. Smothered under the kiss, Milo let out a soft moan and squeezed Alistair’s ass a little tighter. His shirt, linen, breathable, was a vice and he would have yanked it off in a heartbeat (and at this point his heart was in a Volkswagen on an Italian road) if that hadn’t meant he had to stop touching him.

Swelling, his heart pushing his lungs aside, Alistair broke away to kiss a line over the hill of cheekbone to the corner of Milo’s brown eyes, brown like berries and round and fresh with tears wrung out with exhaustion, as Milo panted hot breath on to his neck, filling up the hollow of Alistair’s throat. Milo shoved his wet mouth on the side of his neck, the blood rising to the surface under his tongue, which dazzled Alistair so much he had to wrench him off and kiss him hard. A kiss with no movement, just two pairs of lips slammed together as above their nostrils worked to drink in as much oxygen as would last an eternity. If only they could stop up their noses with cigarette filters and breath each other's carbon dioxide until, Breathing In/Breathing Out, they fainted together.

One of Alistair’s hands plunged down the collar of Milo’s shirt and grasped wildly at his skin, warping it higher in waves, folding it over his fingers, feeling the irrepressible lines of stiff muscle beneath a coating of soft, necessary fat. 

Milo reached up and shoved his glasses off. They connected with the floor loudly but neither of them noticed as Milo studied Alistair’s eyes. Inwardly, Alistair thrilled. His heart stirred the blood behind his eyes in Charybdis-like fury. He surged forward, aiming to succeed a richer kiss but Milo put up his arm, crossed it over his chest, a red rope. 

Bile, black as a crow, seared the lining of his spleen, his stomach, a terrible Baudelairian feeling. He had cocked it all up. It was a joke Milo had made, not a proposition. Was Alistair so desperate he would jump on anyone who expressed the slightest bit of kindness? A kicked cat he was, purring against a scratching hand when its partner held a slap. 

In wait for the rejection, in the midst of memorising the squeeze of Milo’s hands under his ass, the way Milo’s tongue slid against his, Alistair only became aware he was in flight the second before his back smacked on the duvet.

Milo, a vision in knitwear between Alistair’s legs, kissed him up against the headboard, doing some truly magnificent things with his tongue that made Alistair so grateful he didn’t have to rely on the strength of his knees anymore. 

Precum was dampening the front of Alistair’s pyjama trousers, the give of the material teasing where a thick pair of jeans would have rucked him finely, something to brace against, not the cheap elastic waistband that was digging teeth marks into his flesh and tickling the head of his cock up to the edge but never over it. Wrapping his arms around Milo, he pulled him flush to his body, the pressure immediately sending a white flash over Alistair’s vision. The moan pulled from him wasn’t a play moan, an imitation of porn, but an involuntary release of pleasure, the scream on slicing oneself while clipping fingernails, the nervous system’s inexorable contribution to noise pollution. 

As he chased the feeling, he felt the reciprocation, a swell, bite of zipper, on the tender flesh of his thigh. The beginnings of a moan rounded in Milo’s mouth; Alistair felt it in how he changed the position of his lips, the finesse of his tongue. While the deep, hollow, hallowed sound spilled past him, an impish voice spoke in Alistair’s stead.

“Are you going to fuck me?” it said and Alistair’s teeth nipped at the receiving ear.

The warmth tackling Alistair vanished. Milo, as he was pulling away, shoved off with his hand in the center of Alistair’s stomach, winding him so that when he sat up to see Milo clogging up his shoes with shaking feet he couldn’t air a note of protest.

“I have-- fuck-- I have a class at nine. We’re reviewing everything for the test, if I miss this I’ll fail the entire class, it's like twenty percent of the final grade - I told you this already didn’t I - she only uses tests, you know the type right, a wanker really, see you next week yeah? Yeah.” 

He didn’t even bother to close the door before he went loping off down the hall loud enough that Alistair could still hear him when he reached the stairs. 

Oh spite.

Legs a-wobble, the rough kiss still residing on his tongue, Alistair walked to the desk which was wallpapered with open books, open notebooks, and Milo’s laptop. The sod - well, failed sod - had been in such a hurry to leave he left everything behind. God knew how he would take notes for that blasted class. Now it fell on Alistair to pack the lot up and drop it secretly at Milo’s door like a bastard child delivered to an orphanage. 

Oh spite. Alistair slapped his forehead. Leave it to him to think of the logistics of avoidance rather than the reason. He didn’t want to avoid Milo, a quite original state of being for him, but what other course of action could he take? The inevitable glance dodging would crumble tute and their tutor would have no choice but to reassign them to the Asian PPEs who had more facts than opinions and would smash down an argument with no joy except when they were awarded firsts. 

With regret fully brewed in his heart, Alistair threw himself back on his bed, determined to sleep like the dead but winced as he landed on his belly.

An albatross his yet-to-flag erection was, curved at the mercy of his waistband till he thumbed the belt under his balls and began to relieve himself of the stress without any bid to sensuality, wanking in the half-awake chore of felling morning wood. Unable to help himself, he thought of his ass fitting into Milo’s hands, the snarling laugh he had freed at the desperation Alistair worshiped up to his eye, yet there was a roughness with which he masturbated because it should be Milo touching him as he, in turn, touched Milo, sex Oxford-style if Milo was still timorous for a proper fuck. Fuck.

Oh fuck, he was coming. Coming with Milo’s face cupped in his mind’s eye.

After the walk of shame to the tissue box, post washing up, subsequent to the self-tucking in and the yanking off of the light, Alistair swore to himself he would not be dreaming of Milo tonight even as he snuggled deep into the spot where Milo had sat, the indent the perfect place to tuck his legs.

* * *

The dorm building was nondescript, belonging more on the campus of a liberal arts American school than the ancient institution they both attended, and Alistair wasn’t even sure he had the right place and had to doublecheck the email with his old room assignment which had been fermenting in his inbox since the summer. He rounded the grey quoins with apprehension.

It was a bright, autumny day, a sweet breeze fending off the heavy blanket of sunlight that lay over everything. Slipping in the door behind a resident, he was equal parts thankful and mournful the room was on the first floor: he would not get winded from climbing stairs, sweat glossing his forehead, but in no time he was at the door, name-tag sized plaque etched _120_ riding above the peephole.

Courage mustered, Alistair knocked. Milo opened the door.

“Oh, hey. Um-” He was dressed nicely, a thundercloud coloured sweater, and his hair was styled, dashing. His eyes darted down either side of the hall. “I wouldn’t think you’d know where this place is.”

“Can I come in?” he asked. “I have something for you.”

“For me?”

“You are living in a single, aren’t you?”

Without catching himself, Milo rolled his eyes and Alistair’s heart leapt a millimeter. Milo cocked his head towards the room.

It was a _Sliding Doors_ moment, seeing the tiny room Alistair was nearly consigned to, the standard-issue white desk and set of drawers, the three-meter width. As often as Alistair disagreed with his father, he was shockingly grateful he hadn’t been consigned to this gaol, you could barely find the space for both your legs between the bed and the wall. Sunlight, clean and fluffy as cotton balls, cluttered the room.

On the made bed, Lauren sat in a tight fuzzy sweater and jeans rolled to her knees, revealing the unshaved prickles on her shins. She was barefoot. Her hair was pulled back, and she was leafing through a magazine.

“Hello,” she said brightly when she saw him. “You’re the boy from freshers week. The Conservative one.” Not even a question, as sure as the blade of a knife.

He ignored her. To look at her made him apprehensive. He hadn’t expected Milo would want to chat about last night but with Lauren present the chances plummeted to nil. He forced a laugh. 

“First-floor room, hm? Guess you aren’t worried about people dropping in for sherry or vomiting in your window.”

“What?”

“Evelyn Waugh? _Brideshead_ \-- Nevermind.”

“Don’t know it, sorry.” Alistair noticed a slump to his shoulders that hadn’t been there the day before. He looked exclusively at the space between Alistair’s eyebrows, a space that was destined to be scarred by one prominent wrinkle in the future.

“Course you do Milo,” Lauren said. She stretched out her legs and placed the magazine flat across her thighs. It was open to a two-page spread, a black woman with impossibly blue glittery eyeshadow, bare shoulders. He thought it might have been Freema Agyeman in the picture but couldn’t be sure from his angle. “There was a movie a couple years ago of it. Hayley Atwell and Emma Thompson. My mum watches it every time it's on telly ‘cause she’s in absolute love with Ben Whishaw.”

“The television series was better,” Alistair said sourly.

“Never saw it,” she said, picking at her nail polish. Shamrock green flakes fell on the model in the magazine like leaves from a silver lime; they slid into the crevice of the glossy pages. “I always preferred the second half of the book anyway after Sebastian effs off to Tunisia, when it’s Charles and Julia sad on a boat.”

“Killed anyone recently?”

“I have; I’m becoming the new Mary Cotton if you can believe it. I’ve gotten about eleven people, not bad for a girl, hm?”

Alistair wanted to punch her or sit on her legs and make her uncomfortable. But he resigned himself to the fact she would be staying and untangled the strap of the bag off his shoulder.

“You forgot this,” he said, holding out Milo’s laptop. 

“Jesus, thanks,” Milo said, his mouth full of wonder. He accepted the rectangle reverentially as if Alistair was entrusting a sacred relic to him. “I thought I’d have to buy a new one. You’re a lifesaver, Alistair.”

Alistair felt his heart get warm but shrugged outwardly. “It’s not a big deal.”

“Yeah, well,” Milo shrugged too and looked around his room. He gestured toward the bed, “Do you want to…?”

“No thanks, I’ve got to study,” he said. “Goodbye Lauren.”

“Bye,” she said, already back to her magazine, her Northern accent turning the word into a pinprick of light.

“See you at tute?” Milo volunteered. 

“Probably,” Alistair said and left, scuttling down the hall where he stole around the corner before Milo could catch up, put a hand on his shoulder and wrench him back into the room. Lungs expanded in relief as he stepped out into the sunshine but he couldn’t help but feel a certain disappointment at not feeling that hand.

* * *

The same afternoon he was eating lunch with Shreyoshi who was in the same study group as him for their Greek Philosophy course, a second year. Shreyoshi was studying for a PPE degree and was using her copy of _Phaedo_ as a coaster to her glass of pink lemonade. She was scrolling through her phone, the language was still set Bengali from when she had bought it at the Apple Store in Chittagong, the craquelure of mismanagement obscuring the texts to her boyfriend Sam.

They used each other as shields, plausible deniability that they had a companion to sit with and thus didn’t need to be kept company by a well-meaning upperclassman. Too concerned with being in ceaseless contact with Sam, abroad in Turkey with an archeological brush sweeping the sands of Gobekli Tepe off fragments of bowls and sending a selfie of every plate of dolma, Shreyoshi was attuned to each bleep and quack from a phone be it hers or on the other side of the room and spoke as if in a trance, out of the corner of her mouth, in half-sentences, spontaneously. 

Though he never minded eating in silence, he was upset that Shreyoshi didn’t try to engage him as she usually did; they weren’t close friends, not even really friends at all but they had enough common ground to spend time on their own without fearing the well of words running dry. Ever since Sam had taken up his professor’s suggestion that he spend an extra six weeks in Asia Minor, Shreyoshi had been heartsick by the distance. She seldom spoke and when she did it seldom was about anything else, not that Alistair minded: it was an intriguing story. 

The dough of his Cornish pasty flaking onto his lap distracted him to the point where he did not see the round face of Lauren Small insinuate itself over Shreyoshi’s shoulder.

“Any news?” she said eagerly. Shreyoshi swerved her head away from her phone, unphased by the surprise, and pecked Lauren on the cheek.

“Not yet. It’s three in Ankara so he’s probably still digging.” She gestured to Lauren to show the seat beside her was bare.

“Oh, no, I’ve got a meeting with my tutor to drop my Biology course before our first exam.”

“Aww, good luck hug?” Shreyoshi held open her arms into which Lauren happily fell. “Happy Michaelmas love, the worst is yet to come.” Lauren groaned as she nestled into Shreyoshi’s neck.

Christ, women. Alistair hunched over, chewing quietly as he could, hoping to pass as a stranger, no one Lauren would feel the need to be polite to, _Shreyoshi, who’s your friend_?

“Wait a minute, I know you,” Lauren said once she finally caught a glimpse of Alistair making himself as innocuous as possible. “Tory boy. From this morning. Milo’s told me all about you.”

“Has he.”

“You're his tute partner. What a coincidence, right?”

“Yes.”

“I hope you’re not this terse in your sessions,” she joked. Or it would have been a joke in any other mouth, out of hers it was the vial of poison the hand of her voice tipped into his ear. On realising the only answer she would be getting was an acknowledging jerk of the eyebrows, she tugged straight her sweater hem, gone crooked in the hug, and said: “Well, say hi to him for me. Yoshi, can I call you later?” Shreyoshi assented gladly. “Okay. A bientot.” The words trailed off behind her like the string of a kite as she grew distant among the tables, loping away like a disturbed bunny.

“I didn’t know you knew Lauren,” Shreyoshi said, the first thing she had said to him all day.

“We had dinner freshers’ week. I wouldn’t call that 'friends'.” Alistair spoke with a vitriol approaching a spurned lover, an interpretation Shreyoshi was taking as if dinner automatically equaled sex and dinner was a night out at sketch instead of being cramped between the sportcoated shoulders of sweaty virgins.

“Okay,” she said, a suggestive arch.

“Listen, I have to go now or I’ll be late for an appointment. I’ll see you later, alright?”

“What, now? You’re just going to leave me?”

“My brother wants to Skype while he’s still on the plane and the flight’s not very long.”

“Is he coming home?”

“Not likely. He’s going from Montevideo to Bueno Aires. He wants to go on an Evita tour: her tomb, Casa Rosada.”

“Pissing Webber fans,” Shreyoshi said goodnaturedly. “Oh, well. But we’ll see each other tomorrow, right?”

“Maybe.”

“I can always ask Lauren to join us.”

“You aren’t tempting me.”

Shreyoshi’s phone buzzed, and she snatched it up. It must have been Sam seeing how quickly she dialed a number and pressed the phone against her ear like she was listening for a heartbeat. How foolish were the young and in love.

* * *

Seb was loving South America. He was sure he met the grandson or the great-grandson of a Nazi collaborator at the airport, this exemplary deduction off the basis of the man’s order of Asbach Uralt and his recent trip to the opera for a production of _Tristan und Isolde_. The hike he took up to Machu Picchu populated with so many characters he could have written a really shitty novel: the Georgian-American with the hair like Wolverine and his waifish girlfriend, the ball cancer patient on one last thrill before decisive surgery, eight Australian rowers who, once they found out Seb was English, couldn’t help but rib him with jokes about prison guards and colonialism. All of them crammed together in hostels up the mountains. Said when he got drunk on the top of the temple, having snuck away from camp in the dead of night, everything clicked into place as the stars walked towards him and showed him their hands because apparently planting your inebriated ass on an ancient culture’s place of worship was less important than the world’s weakest trip. Alistair made the excuse he had an essay to write and shut his laptop unceremoniously on Seb’s _goodbye_ and _i love you_.

* * *

Alistair did not see Milo all week. Running late because of misalignment on his phone alarm, Milo was already seated in the cracked leather armchair, avoiding looking anywhere near his eyes, no red flag to be seen though Alistair would have preferred a white one.

Milo went very legal with his essays, tracing the histories of James Pratt and John Smith versus Oscar Wilde versus Peter Wildeblood, their arguments, their outcomes, public perception and support, while Alistair went for specific acts: Buggery 1533, Offenses Against the Person 1861, Sexual Offenses 1967, Sexual Offences Amendment 2000. A tsk nearly flew from Milo’s throat as he realised he forgot to include _Sutherland v. United Kingdom_ , and during the oral examination period Alistair pointed out the Jeremy Thrope trial should not have been included as an example as he hadn’t been prosecuted for homosexuality but rather conspiracy and incitement to murder which, they could all agree, was a perfectly reasonable thing to be arrested for. 

Even as the feeling of victory melted sweetly on his tongue, a victory he needed after last week’s fiasco, Alistair found it hard to shrug away the adolescent schoolboy taunting him in the background: what kind of bloke knows this much about queers? But the knowing gleam in his tutor’s eyes made it all the better when he was commended on the sophistication of his paper. 

Trying to avoid exiting the class at the same time as Milo, he employed the ingenious scheme of packing his bag very slowly and cajoling their tutor in gloating about his daughter’s football achievements, a star forward on her secondary school team. It hadn’t worked.

“Ryle? About those books you promised me, when can I pick them up?” He said very casually. He should have been an actor.

Alistair blew him off with a line about how didn’t really have time to talk right now while their tutor was rummaging around in his desk for the picture of his daughter celebrating a win like she was Paul Henderson.

Once he had disentangled himself from talk of thirteen-year-old girls breaking each other’s wrists and ankles on the pitch, sure Milo was secured within the confines of his terrible dorm room, Alistair strode down the hall as if he owned the place, brewing opening lines for the week’s essay on the pregnancy crisis that birthed Victoria’s ascension when he was hauled through the weak aperture of a door and thrust up against its backside.

A mouth fastened onto his and in reflex, he kissed back. He would have recognised Milo’s tactics even if he hadn’t been overwhelmed by that looming face, filling up the latitude of his sight before its lips hushed any protest. It was a Pavlovian response by now. To kiss Milo.

He shoved Milo away. “Fuck you, Richards,” he said before he fumbled open the door.

“Ryle. Ryle! I’m sorry, okay?” Milo shouted at him as Alistair stalked down the hall. “Hey, slow down.”

A hand wrenched him still. When Alistair turned Milo quailed at the sight of his glare. 

“For what? Just now, last week? Or just being a shit tute partner? Do your research this week, promise me.”

Milo took a step forward but was discouraged from another when Alistair backed away. Milo clenched his jaw. 

“Alistair-- It's-- I’m just sorry. I am. Does it have to be specific? In general, I am sorry. About everything.”

“So you regret it?” A tar was beginning to stick around his heart.

“What? No. I-- I don’t. I don’t. Fuck. It’s all just so very… Hard. To consider. I mean I never even thought we’d be friends or anything close to. It was you who had said that you didn’t intend to like me.”

Alistair felt fucking ill. He sunk his teeth into his tongue until it didn’t feel like the words came out of his mouth.

“A sentiment I stick by. If you’re having problems, why don’t you talk to Lauren about them?”

This time Milo took a step backward. His expression was unreadable. He flicked his gaze to the floor and back up, shook his head.

“Fuck you, Ryle.”

“You can pick up your books between three and seven. I won’t be in then.”

“Fuck you, Ryle.”

Alistair was looking at the far wall. Milo was a fleck in his vitreous fluid to rub into absence. He curled his lip and walked away.

* * *

He stayed out of his room all day. He got lunch alone and read the same five pages of his book at least twenty times, his mind adrift in a storm cloud. The tape of their confrontation kept running through his memory, filing back into the machine instead of ribboning into an oubliette. The memory of Milo’s voice, both crawling with scorn and begging for pity, ignited frisson upon Alistair’s skin though the sun was beaming down upon him. Just to pass the time Alistair slept in one of the study nooks in the library, so he was lagging as he climbed to his floor.

The empty hallway let him breathe easily. Unlocking the door with a manufactured steadiness, Alistair wondered if he would be pleased that the books were gone. He would have to talk to Milo again to tell him when it would be a good time to return them. The thought was grey coloured and this ambiguity distracted Alistair so he didn’t notice Milo in the room until he spoke.

“I want to talk.”

“I thought I said I would be back by seven,” Alistair said, brushing past him as he walked to his desk. He shuffled the books around there, in a state not to be bothered.

“You did. Which is why I came here at six forty-five.”

“You haven’t touched anything have you?”

“I don’t need to steal your stuff. But I might like to. It’d make you come back to my room.”

“So I can see you eight inches into Lauren? No thanks.”

“Alistair-”

“Whatever happened to Ryle? Actually, what happened to ‘Fuck you, Ryle’? I don’t know how things are done at Westminster but at Harrow we generally said goodbye like- well just like that: goodbye. So, goodbye Richards.”

“Alistair-”

“Or let me put it in a way you’ll understand.” Alistair turned and stared Milo straight in the eye. “Fuck you, Richards.”

“I’d bet you’d like that.”

Molars ground against each other. “What’s that supposed to mean?” 

“What was it you said to me the other night? ‘Do you want to fuck me?’ “

“It was ‘are you going to fuck me?’ Actually.” He felt proud. He didn’t drop his gaze in shame as he figured Milo would expect. Milo with his arms crossed so tightly over his chest you’d think he was a girl trying to shove up her tits.

“So, you remember.”

“I never said I hadn’t. Are you going to leave now?”

“No. What the fuck? Alistair, no. I want to apologise. For-” he put up his hand, “for acting like an ass today. And for running out on you without explanation.”

“You had a class to get to. I understand.”

“No. I went all gay panic on you and I’m sorry.”

“I’m not gay.”

Milo’s expression, before magnanimous resignation, now dropped into incredulity. 

“You kissed me. You asked me to fuck you.”

“As I recall it was you who flirted with me first.”

“You’re not really trying to spin us making out, are you? Can you talk at all in a way that doesn’t make it seem like you’re getting interviewed by the _Evening Standard_? Jesus, however, whatever, the circumstances - this isn’t really involving you, by the way - I ran out on you and that wasn’t okay.”

“I’m not bothered.”

“You’re not bothered?”

Alistair shrugged. “I’ve basically already forgotten everything. Not bothered in the slightest.”

“Oh, well.” Milo unfastened himself from the wall and walked toward Alistair with steady determination. His arms reached out and by the time he was gripping Alistair by the shoulders, he was already in the midst of kissing him.

He was much softer this time. Lapping waves dragging the stiff ring of a life preserver under their sway. Tenderly, Alistair opened his mouth but just as he pressed his tongue forward Milo pulled away, a self-satisfied smirk on his kiss-purpled lips.

“Unbothered, eh?”

So, what? You’ve apologised; you’ve kissed me. Is your itinerary complete, because I have a research paper due Wednesday I’d like to work on.”

“Can we sit down?”

Alistair gestured toward the bed. 

“Together?” Milo insisted.

Stretched lengthwise across his bed, Alistair picked at the corner of the Tottenham poster that hung above; Seb had left it for him in the crates of university junk he hadn’t bothered taking to America. Milo sat by Alistair’s feet, bare now he had taken off his shoes, and Alistair shifted modestly every time Milo cast his eyes over his naked ankles.

“I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the last couple of days,” Milo said.

“That’s new for you.” But Milo took the comment as jocular and twisted to deliver a pinch on Alistair’s left foot which, in turn, revenged itself with a light kick. 

“Things between me and Lauren, they’re, well, they’re sort of complicated. She sleeps with me then she won’t stay the night and she’s called me her friend. But I really like her. She's funny and bright and, you’ve seen her, gorgeous. And I’m sure she likes me back.” He stopped speaking and looked over to Alistair like he expected him to say something. “And,” he continued when it was clear Alistair hadn’t gotten it, whatever it was, “If I want her, which I do, I can’t be seen with any girls romantically.”

“Okay, so don’t date other girls.” If Milo had made it clear all he wanted was a vent, Alistair would never have let himself get kissed. Not that he didn’t understand in theory: what’s one more secret when the pair of you have rubbed your cocks together?

“But…” Milo nodded as if what he was saying was obvious.

“But?”

“I get, you know…”

“Lonely?”

“If you want to put it like that, yeah.” His cheeks had the glow of a blush.

“So... wank? This shouldn’t be very hard to figure out.” 

“That’s what I thought. But when we… the other night. It’s a lot better than wanking. Did you wank after I left?”

Alistair’s mouth fell open. Thankfully Milo was looking down for long enough for Alistair to compose himself.

“Because I did once I got back to my room. And I was late for my class. No thanks to you for that, by the way.”

The picture of Milo sitting in his prison cell dorm room, erection fat in his trousers, anxiously glancing at the clock, calculating how much time it would take, the wank and the dash to the lecture hall, realising there wasn’t time but the disquiet between his legs being too much to ignore he opened the front of trousers, pulled out his prick and-

Alistair crossed his legs. “And you are suggesting I fuck you until you’re able to bully Lauren into being your girlfriend?” he asked. Weirdly, hope was fluttering in his chest.

“I’m not going to bully her. Jesus.”

“Really not the operative part of the question. Bully, convince, whatever.”

“Yes.” He was affectless in an almost remorseful way.

“Yes,” Alistair encouraged.

“No, I’m answering yes.”

“Oh.”

Milo turned slowly to face him. His head bowed humbly, he unfolded Alistair’s legs and began to run his hand up his thigh.

Alistair jumped up and fled to the far end of the room, panting as he braced himself on the windowsill. If the concrete below didn’t look inviting.

“This feels familiar,” Milo said. He eased off the bed and moved down the few steps to press his forehead against the door, the knob a brass glint within his fist. “See you at tute Ryle.”

And as the lock clicked open, “Yes.”

“What?” Milo looked back. 

“Yes. I-- Yes. About Lauren and you. And me. I’ll help you. I mean,” Alistair added, “I’m not doing this altruistically. I’m getting something out of it too.”

“You are? Like what?” All anxiety missing and very pleased with himself, Milo leant against the door and, with his arms crossed, slouched tastefully.

“For an Oxford student, you can be really thick sometimes.” Alistair strode across the floor, trapped down the three steps to the cramped landing where, had it not been his intention, Alistair and Milo would be at an intimate proximity, and usurped the autonomy of Milo’s lips. 

Milo, having at this point sorted out his own conflict, allowed Alistair to put his hands under his shirt and unbutton his trousers and rub their cocks together on the bed. They didn’t have sex that first afternoon. Just completed what had been left unfinished by the preceding night. When Milo came, he came on Alistair’s chest which Milo had insisted he expose by pulling on his shirt rather petulantly instead of kissing Alistair the way he wanted. Very naughty, Alistair thought as he pulled the shirt over his head and was rewarded very quickly for his deed. 

Though he had finished first, Milo was polite enough to wait until Alistair had come before he slumped on the bed, his shirt wrinkled, his cock leaking out of the aperture of his trousers like drool on the side of a sleep-shameless mouth. There was a distinct electricity of anticipation that raised the hair on Alistair’s arms. Now that Milo got what he wanted, felt an orgasm at Alistair’s hands, would he decide it wasn’t worth it, that what had happened was enough, an experiment that need not be repeated now that it had disproved the hypothesis with brutal accuracy? 

Alistair undoffed his shirt and retrieved a box of tissues. Milo cleaned himself up and transferred the tissue into the rubbish bin offered but he remained on the bed, his head thrown back against the wall, his eyes closed.

There wasn’t much Alistair thought to do so he sat at his desk and rustled out his current assignments, bending over the paper and resisting the urge to glance over until he fell into the drift of mental exercise. It wasn’t when his hand began to ache with writing that he heard the first stirrings to his left. Milo was rubbing his eyes and, once he took his hands away, looked dumbly at Alistair as the static on his retinas wore off. 

“So,” Milo said, “same time next week?”

“You want to schedule this?”

“Have you ever understood a figure of speech?”

“You’re so epileptic, it shouldn’t be a wonder I get confused.”

“I’m just saying I’m up for it.”

“Okay.”

“Okay? Are you acknowledging or agreeing?”

“Same time next week.” Alistair bent his head back over his work and wished he had longer hair.

* * *

It was a schizophrenic sex life. The ordered, weekly schedule of screw and abscond in Alistair’s locked room was disrupted the first time Milo dropped in the day after the usual time, explaining his presence by the fiendish seduction of _The Autobiography of a Flea_ which he was reading for an essay on Victorian sexuality. After that, all planned structure collapsed into vapour. Alistair contemplated turning down an encounter at some point, imagining the expression of confusion spreading over Milo as he realised that Alistair’s amiability was not infinite, as he cupped his trouser front dejectedly, but he could never bring himself to do so; once Milo was in his room, an immutable occupant and biting his lip sheepishly, Alistair had no choice but to set aside his work, hang up on a phone call with his mother once, and let himself be swept to bed.

It wasn’t as though Milo was an insatiable Pan who needed attention immediately upon arousal; he was much more considerate. If he found Alistair walled in by books he would apologise and try to leave but Alistair would ask him to stay and be the one to leave his work. Again, don’t misunderstand, not because he felt obligated to get rid of Milo so quickly, in fact, he would have liked Milo to sit on his bed, make himself busy as Alistair worked with him at his back, but because feeling Milo at his back, knowing why he was there, drove Alistair to distraction. Though that distraction didn’t often end by the time they both had come.

And they weren’t very adventurous in their activities either. Wanking in Alistair’s room on Alistair’s bed. Milo’s room was too small and the walls too thin for any confidence to be invested in that cell, and Milo’s housemates were forever dropping in, consulting him on what they should choose for house film night ( _Blade Runner_ ), asking if he wanted a ladle of curry (not now, but save a bowl), condescending to ask Alistair his opinion when it was obvious he wasn’t going to clear out. 

Sometimes they would kiss, but kissing wasn’t a romantic element necessarily. It got them both aroused to the point of discomfort.

Sometimes they would kiss for hours, their hands straying no lower than each others’ waists (sliding around and holding and gripping hair, chins, shoulders tense with arousal) until the spark of epiphany went off that they were in fact allowed to touch and one of them would shove his hand down. And then there were the times when Milo was in a state of such keenness while Alistair was so indebted to his work that Milo would stand behind his chair and lay his mouth along the length of Alistair’s neck. There would be no teasing quip every time he pulled away to move higher or when he worked his hand beneath the hem of Alistair’s shirt but in the reflection of his laptop screen Milo’s eyes would meet Alistair’s and flash. And when Milo was daring enough to clutch at the bulge in Alistair’s trousers and say, his voice more air than sound, come to bed, Alistair would comply.

Once after their tutorial, Milo dragged Alistair into the same little room he had confronted him in and, after snogging him intently for several seconds, dropped to his knees and blew Alistair against the unlocked door. Milo’s talent was not impressive but he was able to make Alistair come within seconds. He rose smugly and kissed Alistair on the side of the mouth then passed out of the room without knowing what had really worked. 

It was the sight of Milo on his knees that had excited Alistair. That had got him hard at once. The anticipation as his belt was unlatched and the stiff fabric worked off his hips, knowing Milo was to put his cock in his mouth, a shimmer ran down from his shoulders into his groin. He got to hold the back of Milo’s head, his dark hair.

As soon as it was over Alistair wanted to know what he could do to make it happen again but he was at a loss. It wasn’t as though he could convince Milo that a savvy for blowjobs would help him win Lauren. And as he puzzled over the right combination of words that would charm Milo into opening his mouth, an obsession that put him a week behind in his astronomy class, he realised it was just as easy to take Milo by the hair and push him down, an aggressive move that earned him a flicker of a smile before said smile was rounded by the shape of his cock. Afterwards Milo jokingly demanded a blowjob of his own and to be a good sport Alistair agreed. Alistair got Milo to come rather quickly and though Milo was already on the cusp before Alistair bent forward, Alistair liked to think he was just that skilled. But being good at blowjobs isn’t really a talent he would want to brag about to his mates so he didn’t bring it up to Milo.

But he did think he was good. Better than Milo at least. Instead of just pulling the cock halfway into his mouth and gulping at it like a gormless fish, Alistair, really in a bid not to get choked rather than out of any sort of technique, licked paths from root to tip (the cock pushing along his cheek every time he moved forward, a smear of precome making him screw up his eye) until Milo’s whole cock shone, then he took the tip into his mouth and sucked on it. 

After Milo came - a choked warning before a jet landed on Alistair’s chin, some dripping down the front of his shirt - Alistair leapt up from the bed, ostensibly to get tissues, but really to hide how red his face had turned because, fuck, when Milo came Alistair let his eyes drift up for a split second and was struck by the look of absent bliss and satisfaction he saw. And he liked that. When he was alone, barely hearing the necessary comment about how Alistair finally put something in his mouth that wasn’t a foot, he interrogated that enjoyment, thinking it was perhaps a sociopathic instinct to identify and exploit weaknesses in an opponent's defense which was a conclusion he didn’t think highly of but felt it reasonable until, that is, later the same night when he was reading in bed and found his attention was sliding off the page to worry at the memory of Milo’s flushed face. The eyelids fluttering, the lips slightly parted, the deceptive line of concern between the eyebrows. The dulcet and longing _huh_ of his orgasm. Alistair wormed his hand inside his pants. So it wasn’t so selfish after all. 

Shameful.

* * *

The revelation that viewing Milo’s face could be an aesthetic pleasure for Alistair was an acute irritation. Whenever the image flitted into his mind, Alistair was sure to flee the reminders in his room to take an endless walk in the cold air; it was impossible to masturbate while mid-stride mid-quad. For a fortnight, Alistair made himself a rare fixture in his own room, taking his studying into the library (which he hated, having to listen to the shuffling and clearing throats and yawing of dozens of surrounding students made him want to rip out his hair) and eating at odd hours to avoid a lunchtime collision. He locked his door. Yet when he started locking his door he began having the fantasy of Milo coming into his room while he was sleeping and climbing into bed with him. He woke groping over his shoulder for the warm wall of Milo’s absent body.

For the two tutorial meetings they had during those weeks, Alistair calculated when he had to leave his room in order to arrive on time for the session while excluding any marginal minute that Milo might harness for a confrontation. 

And when he felt relaxed enough to resume his own schedule, when Milo made no advances of antagonism, he was naturally caught off guard.

Their tutor was pottering around on the telephone as they were filing their essays away in their bags when Milo leaned over and whispered, “Y’know, if you don’t want to blow me again, you can just say so. I won’t be offended.” 

Alistair’s grip tightened on his bag but he didn’t drop it or sputter as he imagined Milo expected him to. “I’ve been busy. My life doesn’t revolve around your cock.”

“Mine certainly seems to.”

“I don’t have anything for the rest of the day so if needs must.”

When Milo didn’t respond, there was the sense Alistair had gone too far in his pellucidity but at a glance Milo seemed to be chuffed, neatly arranging the zipper on his bag, a dazzled star-speck in the water of his eye.

“See you later then.”

Alistair showered (thank heavens he had chosen a college that afforded ensuites to first years), slopping a heavy washcloth under his arms and around his neck and between his legs, nullifying his unclean musk of yesterday with the inoffensive nearly floral smell of soap. Lauren, he recalled, smelled like alcohol, a heavy mauve smell that curled off her like smoke. It ought to be a change.

Seb had mailed him a box of condoms the second week. He had thrown away the box, which had _good luck and stay safe!!!_ written on it in legible Sharpie, but kept the contents, the cerulean wrappers like a tantalizing candy foil, and shook them into the back of a drawer. 

The first condom he pulled out had a thread of dust clinging to it like a kite’s string. He contemplated the wrapper as he dried his hair, wondering if he should try one on. He and Milo were roughly the same size and he didn’t want to be in anything ( _medias res_ , _flagrante delicto_ , Milo) when that necessary element presented itself as faulty. But he didn’t. The idea embarrassed him too much. It seemed like something a mum would suggest he do. 

Alistair reclined on his bed with a book, whichever classic he had cracked for prestige but found too boring to continue past the second chapter; he ditched _Middlemarch_ on a low wall outside a restaurant when he was fifteen. Were his pants too lame? He had obviously changed them after the shower but the colour (white) and the style (Y-fronts) made him nervous, it was a cliche. Obviously he wouldn’t be wearing them for long but there were first impressions to be made; Milo hadn’t seen him in just underwear before. They hadn’t taken off their clothes since the day they set their compact - the day when Milo had come on his belly, a warm serpent of semen that moved as he breathed - and even then, Alistair had only felt underneath his shirt, he hadn’t gotten the chance to see anything. 

Then there was a hiccup of a knock. Alistair made a nonchalant, entre noise.

With a diffident smile, Milo entered the room.

“Hey,” he said as he closed the door. They never needed to lock it; no one ever came round but Milo.

“Hey.” He set his book on the nightstand just before Milo climbed on top of him. 

Milo was already hard and Alistair’s stomach bubbled when he felt the erection against his leg. They didn’t kiss just then, Milo was close enough for it but he chose instead to wind a lock of Alistair’s hair around his finger. 

“So this is my reward. For being so patient with you.” He bent to Alistair’s neck and kissed down to his collarbone, hooking down the collar of Alistair’s shirt, the pad of his finger teasing in circles. His hand moved to cup Alistair. “I’ve missed this,” he murmured so quietly Alistair wasn’t sure if he was supposed to hear. Or if Milo meant kissing him or touching his cock. 

He was too forward by half, jamming his hand in Alistair’s pants with little preamble. Broaching the subject would be easier if Alistair could get used to Milo in the room as a banality instead of the hot’n’heavy smother he enacted upon Alistair 

At the first determined rifle of his belt, Alistair shot his hand up in front of Milo’s face, a condom retained between two of his fingers. Milo shifted back somewhat. 

“Oh.”

“Do you not want to?”

“No, I’m-” Milo moved back onto his haunches and pulled off his shirt in a slow, unsure motion. He fell back down on Alistair to kiss him again. “But do you,” he said, briefly pulling away, “You’re doing this because you want to? You know you don’t have to make anything up to me. I understand if you want to...not, ever.”

“Don’t be daft, Richards.” Alistair slid his hand down the front of Milo’s trousers and squeezed. “Yes.” 

Slowly jerking Milo’s cock, Alistair braced his free hand on Milo’s back and pushed him prone onto his own chest. He opened his mouth on Milo’s neck and sucked a precise, dark bruise up high. Milo guttered, his hands directionless on Alistair's thighs, rubbing up to his waist, hunting one inch of exposed creamy skin. “I want you to fuck me like the insensible fucking animal you are.” 

Milo rose up, holding himself above Alistair, a weird confusion in his eyes. Alistair forced him higher until they were both sitting upright. He broke eye contact to rip open the condom. He grabbed the back of Milo’s head and forced a long, wet kiss on his mouth. Holding out the condom, he said, “Now put this on your prick before I get bored.”

Without a word of protest, Milo turned sideways to pull off his trousers and as Alistair took off his shirt he watched out of the corner of his eye the natural way Milo’s erection stood up from between his legs, proud and brutal. It was bright in the room, midafternoon sunshine like the aura of a trophy illuminated every line of Milo’s body in a white furry border. Alistair threw his shirt to the floor. He grabbed Milo’s cock, enveloped in latex, and thrust his tongue in his mouth.

It was only the second time Alistair had seen Milo with his shirt off since the brief instance after they had officialised their arrangement. He was in well good shape. His arms and legs were fit, smooth and rounded noticeably with muscle. Alistair wanted to lick the grooves between his stomach muscles, squeeze his thighs and feel their opposition. He wanted to try sticking Milo’s dick very far down his throat, the raw iteration of it; he wanted to whip the condom off.

Milo crooked a finger on the waist of Alistair’s trousers, his thumb sliding along the closed jaw of the zipper.

Alistair was suddenly very reticent about taking off his trousers. His body was plenty to be proud of, no locker room anxieties there, but having to expose his own cock, feel its relief at freedom as it bounced up from where it had been forced recumbent, made him restless, like all Milo would have to do is stroke him a few times and he’d finish. When he nudged Milo’s hand away, Milo pulled back.

“Aren’t you ready?” Milo asked a bit rudely. “Usually we don’t have sex with our trousers still on.”

“Be patient. When you’re this eager to get your cock in me it’s more fun to make you wait.” Excitement rattled up Alistair’s back. He wasn’t so much a fan of Milo’s moodiness but getting to say horrible things to him, _god_ , he hoped they were getting Milo as hard as they made him. 

He stood and stuck one hand down his pants, holding his cock at heel until he was done slowly working his trousers down his legs. A container of Vaseline had been strategically placed on his nightstand earlier and he lobbed to Milo who caught it and looked at it scornfully.

“Fucking hell, you don’t think of anything,” he said. He shook his head. “Lie down.”

“How do you want me?” Alistair meant to sound cheeky but there was a stripe of real nervousness about him. He regretted speaking immediately, wishing he had just laid down on his own, face mashed into the pillow so whatever twist of obvious discomfort could be hidden and so he could kill himself if things went disastrous.

“Lie on your back; it should be easy that way.”

Alistair complied, realising as he settled that holding his cock in a way intended to look powerful had turned into virginal shyness, though he most certainly was not a virgin. Sex with a girl meant his dick wouldn’t be visually present; it would be the nucleus of the whole contract but it wasn’t looked at, wasn’t appraised so flagrantly for its tumescence and its prettiness. He suddenly felt very young. Flat on the bed, feet flat on the bed, his asshole displayed. Nearly flagging, his penis was hypersensitive to the contact with his belly and the hands folded over its length and breadth. 

Milo scooped a dollop of Vaseline up and moved his hand down into the cleft of Alistair’s ass, the paraffin dragging thickly along his skin and clotting on the dark pubic hairs that grew lower down, sweet-smelling. At the first encounter, finger to anus, the heavy glob pressed into him, Alistair seized up - his heart thrummed in protest - obstructing any entrance, a tension that went either overlooked or simply unmentioned by Milo who was rubbing along the circumference with zealous shiatsu intensity. 

Actually that did feel nice. Easy rounds, businesslike concentration. Let him glide off into a realm of moderate pleasure. The way Milo was positioned, thumb doing the bulk, the rest of his hand holding Alistair’s bollocks out of the way, the shifts of his palm, the flexes of his fingers, tickled his balls pleasantly. 

Then a blunt ache stretched out from the center of his ass, and Milo’s mobile finger twisted into him up to the final knuckle. If the Rubicon hadn’t been crossed at this point than they were, at the very least, paddling for its imminent shores. Milo rubbed along the walls, stretching the limits, his methods utilitarian almost medical, he even turned into his elbow to cough loudly like Alistair’s pediatrician used to do whenever he tested his reflexes.

At a turn, as Milo was acclimating his finger to its new claustrophobic digs, he clipped Alistair’s prostate. Something akin to a splash of hot water overwhelmed Alistair’s lower half. An unexpected gasp, cracked tone. His legs flamed.

There was a delay as Milo parsed through the sound, if it was out of pleasure or pain, then he rubbed in what was more of a flicker of a touch than an embrace. Under his hands Alistair’s cock strained for a fix. 

Milo tilted his finger down, resting it on the little lump. The steeple of his finger rose to its full height as Milo leveraged the tip against Alistair’s prostate in a digital arabesque, waggling unscrupulously, turning Alistair’s asshole into a galaxy, starry twinkling, dizzy spinning. A clitorous sensation. It was an effort not to thrust into the air, not to force Milo to his lips.

What was most exciting was how Milo seemed not to give a fuck. He was stroking Alistair like his prostate was the scroll of a computer mouse, disinterestedly browsing. 

Brief, bowing towards, bowing away, so the interim between touches had a dawdling lambency that lacked borders and bled across him like shading done with a rich charcoal pencil. When a wave brushes the shore and after departure a shadow of its presence hovers on the beach - what he wouldn’t give to be on a beach right now. He closed his eyes, imagining the heat of his face was because of an aestival sunshine. The Riviera or vintage Ibiza, seawater covering everything at sitz bath height as Milo dripped above him in a Poseidon pose, the surf soaping around them. A beach somewhere European and romantic. 

Then Milo pinned him down. He held his finger tight against Alistair’s prostate and moved it roughly, shortly, back and forth. What Milo activated extended through his nerves as fine and intricate as a spider web. 

Suchadicksuchanassholesucha _motherfucker_ giveme j-u-st anotherfinger you fucking _asshole_. His legs were shaking. In a dreadful paradox, when he tried to force his legs still against the bed, they only trembled with more intensity. Humiliatingly, he started to make little thrusts on the finger too, willing it to go deeper, be bigger, rub fiercer. 

“Is that what you like?” A freighter punched through his chest. Rumbling telepathy - he played the sentence ten times over in his mind the second after it was spoken, the sound of it, a beam of self-assurance, disembodied from the fact of it. What was it Satre said? Existence precedes essence but essence is more important? Oh yeah. Fuck yes. 

At the moment when, perhaps resting, perhaps teasing, Milo stilled his finger, Alistair had a brief understanding of their relationship. Christ, I’m going to be fucked by Miles Richards, he thought and felt wildly cheated. If ever there was a time to say ‘curses’ unironically, now would be opportune. 

As annoying as Milo penetrating him, dominating him, was, the possibility he could make him cum without fucking him, without even touching his dick, incensed him.

He cleared his throat demurely. Milo’s eyes were soft with concern when he glanced up.

“If you make me cum,” Alistair said, the warning all posture, “I’ll leave you to wank yourself off alone. I mean it.” 

Milo moved away from the spot and the pain, the splinter in the back of his throat, returned as the loveliness ebbed away. Coldness, like there was a draft in the afternoon, subsumed him. It was nearly sweet.

“You can touch yourself until this starts to feel nice again,” Milo said with such peripheral rancour that it was almost absurd he had two of his fingers in Alistair’s ass; he had just felt the second one enter and an unbidden shudder shook his whole body. 

Well aware he could declare a halt to the business, Alistair wondered privately why he had let the discomfort go on. Except he did know, because to end it meant asking Milo to put his finger back on that spot and have him in his thrall once more. 

His cock warming in his hand, Alistair covertly examined Milo, - the dull look in his eyes as he went to his task mechanically - wondering why he didn’t stop, didn’t simply get dressed and walk away, wondering absently if Milo would be able to fit his whole hand inside him and ringing at the prospect. He pulled harder on his cock.

Milo could leave, could take his hands off Alistair, find Lauren or some other girl, probably from the North as well, and be perfectly content with treating Alistair with bureaucratic disinterest, but Alistair couldn’t. Couldn’t leave, couldn’t stop. He stroked himself lightly, his hand dry except for a dampness of worry, and the self-caresses did little to help him retain his arousal. With the fingers inside him - fingers that had bourne the pencil that wrote idiotic Labour hype, that had searched along a sentence in a book and asserted a triumphant yet unconscious tap on the stop, extending to slide Alistair’s glasses higher when they slipped, hesitating on the doorknob, long fingers, nails vacant of scum - in a spinning, squirming, speedy progress, Alistair felt like he was really loved. It was all delusion of course but the thought made his hips too weak to hold the tension of adversary and, in the ungripping, had suitably beguiled himself into thinking he was ready for this.

“You should be ready now,” Milo said and eased his fingers out. He moved to his knees and situated Alistair’s legs around him. With a solid yank, he had Alistair’s ass off the bed and at cock-level. He tried to look in Alistair’s eyes but that would have been impossible to bear; Alistair threw his head to the side and, glancing back, saw Milo intent on lining himself up, felt his thumb next to his asshole holding him open, a part of it inside. 

At the first spread, the head fitting into him, the expand and collapse to the only somewhat slimmer shaft, the air caught in Alistair’s throat and stayed there, an amalgamation of breathlessness as Milo fit himself deeper, releasing, almost mockingly, severe groans with every inch he gained. 

The impaling was immense. Residual pain from the preliminary push was inundated by the fragility that he felt, that Milo was so high and so far within him. His heart jarred like the clapper of a bell. He felt Milo adjust inside him, the easy writhe of a black panther when it's about to leap for its prey.

All sorts of whirlpools and splacks stirred in Alistair’s guts. He felt as if Milo had put his hand right in his open belly, wet to the wrist in his private blood. As much as he tried to hold back any vocalisations, one extant sigh flew out when Milo had pushed in completely, a pathetic keen. Above him, Milo was staring down between their legs at the connection. With a scientific regard Milo pulled back and thrust back in, watching himself move in Alistair who, for his part, half-choked on a moan when Milo slid against his prostate.

It was so much more than when Milo was merely touching him. It was the difference between a stoning and _peine forte et dure_. Absolute swallowing of his coherence. St. Stephen cowing to Margaret Clitherow’s exquisite suffering. 

He had to shake his vision back into clarity. The way Milo was moving in him (fucking him, honest to God fucking him which psychologically didn’t track) threatened to throttle out an expletive of pleasure. Uselessly, he cast a hand up to anchor himself on Milo’s shoulder but he was just too far away and his hand grazed down his arm, tripping along the distended muscles. Milo threw his glance to Alistair and halted upon seeing him (his hair looking like it had been in a maelstrom, his skin rouged with everything he tried to hold back). Alistair felt his stare on his cheek and, though unsure it meant anything but a sudden displeased awareness of whom he was fucking, allowed himself to look back.

Disentangled now from his hypnosis, Milo descended on Alistair, kissing him furiously, one hand clutching a hank of hair while the other dug painfully into his waist. 

This he knew, this was good. 

The facility of Milo’s mouth, its staid methods of advance and retreat, the surface faintly pebbled, the jellylike underside (the nail in his waist was keeping him annoyingly present, keeping him from liquifying into sweetness like meeting the stone in a cherry), were all in pas de deux with his own. 

What would it feel like if Milo fucked his tongue into Alistair’s mouth with harmonic thrusts of his cock or fucked his asshole with his tongue? 

And now Alistair was pleased with the anthropoidal thorn in his side. The constant brutal pawing helped to keep him from getting ahead of himself. His mind was the carbuncle of his body in both meanings of the word, simultaneously a chunk of stone, sparkling with magic, and an amalgamation of boils. In turns, his mind could throw wild shows of intelligence then trip and seethe with detestable thoughts.

He wrapped his arms around Milo and worked to shove him higher inside.

With Milo’s lips preventing him from releasing any more contumely, he was turned to ruminating on how dear Milo was to his body. No question it was sentimental, not to mention obscene and ridiculous, to think of Milo’s cock as an adze which pried open Alistair’s heart by exposing all the licentious flaws of shagging one’s competitor. The way he kissed him, the way he was fucking in to him, that is doing so while kissing him, the way he had his thumb noosed by a lock of his hair as it licked the all variations of bronze had cracked apart his heart, the halves like a gutted pepper.

The most foolish bit of Alistair with its extravagant aorta jutting out of the top like a cock’s comb. Cleft in two it might be easier to roll up and hide.

But cleft it two, after the syrup of blood had trickled out, there would be room enough for Milo to curl up in one of the flats. 

His brain nearly cooked as he squeezed down Milo’s arm. Once he came to his hip, he reached around and gripped his ass, the milky flesh gliding under his palm. 

Their kiss split in two. Milo buried his face in Alistair’s neck. He was moving strangely, slower. Alistair felt his forehead fold against his neck then the unpleasant surge of heat as he sighed.

“Shit,” Milo said under his breath.

“Finish so early?” 

“Fucking condom broke. Probably the Vaseline.” Milo removed himself with a laboured yank of his hips; a rush of air hit Alistair, disagreeably ventilated. The knackered rubber crackled as Milo rolled it off his cock. Searching for the bin, he exited the bed, leaving Alistair unbalanced, the weight on the duvet was the only thing to which he was acclimatised. Milo’s ass wandered around the room, the phlegmatic nude; it was the first time Alistair saw him naked from the back. Had Milo not been so far away, throwing the condom soundlessly into the bin, Alistair would have unfolded his arm and stroked the notches that slumped into his buttocks at each harried output. 

As he usually did, Milo spoiled it by speaking.

“Where’re the rest of your condoms?”

“Oh, sod the bloody condoms, Richards. Get back in.”

“Are you sure?”

“Pregnancy shouldn’t be a concern of yours. In this instance.”

“If you’re so keen-” Milo took strode to the bed and, once he had mounted, pierced Alistair in a single unstumbling motion.

Alistair wanted to curl inward. Cold air has an elucidating property that is not extolled as often as it should be. When Milo ducked for another kiss, Alistair turned his head and pushed Milo into his neck where he went to work, lavishing his mouth along the height of it. Milo growled into his neck and fucked irregularly. Hard, brisk thrusts that felt like an erotic attempt at Morse Code. Fucking blocklike as he brought his hand up to stroke Alistair’s shoulder dreamily.

Alistair let himself be distracted by the stroking sound like wind skimming the page of a book. It was too tolerant. He bit his lip but he couldn’t help himself.

“I never thought you’d be such a slut for it,” Alistair said. “You really can think of nothing else.” Without whispering it was like he was delivering an oration the way he boomed beside Milo’s ear. Though he was repelled by the size - it made everything too present, changed it into something that couldn’t be passed off as fantasy or a dream - he made to continue because as much as the noise swamped him, it had a mask of superintendence. He would not allow himself to whisper, to murmur, to garment his voice in the volume of intimacy. “How long has it been since you wanted to fuck me? The first day? When you saw me in front of your bed, when you touched my hand as we swapped keys? Or was it when you pressed your thigh against mine at dinner and you imagined me with my ass in the air? You’ve been so fucking obvious.”

He slid both his hands back to Milo’s ass and clutched it tightly. Despite knowing the marks would fill immediately, he still dug his nails in. 

“And wanking off while thinking of me, god, there can’t be anything more pathetic.” 

Alistair welcomed the faint sting of Milo’s teeth pressing into his neck. The release of the bite distracted him enough that he didn’t realise Milo was kissing his way up his face until his lips found their mark. Alistair twitched away, going hot, but Milo tried again. At his second failure, he lowered himself to kiss down and up Alistair’s chest where each connection rustled like the music rubbed from crickets. With a brief glance, he returned to servicing Alistair’s neck. 

“You’ve always wanted me and that’s what makes it so hard to finally have me. Because you make it too obvious. I couldn’t respect you after knowing how badly you want this. It’s all you want.”

He lifted Milo’s head from its dormancy on his neck and held him up. The liveliness had retreated from Milo’s eyes but, as Alistair looked at the cool brown of them, they still retained the welcoming beauty they had possessed since the first time Alistair had avoided their gaze. He was arresting.

Alistair stuck his hand between them, Milo’s stomach rolling along his knuckles, the back of his hand, and he stroked himself. If only Milo’s dick was pressed against his.

He wanted to flip Milo over and ride him until his dick hurt. He wanted Milo to cum while he hated him.

“You’ll give up on this once you know what it’s like.” 

Milo gathered his wrists together and pushed them over his head. His pace slowed, each thrust coming less frequently but harder, a working, conscious fuck. Alistair tried to move down, tried to accelerate things.

“No,” Milo said, barely speaking above a whisper. With his other hand, he felt down the line of Alistair’s body until he came to his thigh. He let his weight rest. Alistair bucked up, driving his erection onto Milo’s belly, taut as it was with muscle and the application of fucking.

“Steady now.” He interposed his hand over Alistair’s cock. 

He was so selfish, so egotistical, so dickish wanting Alistair to cum on his cock alone. Alistair tried to wriggle a leg high enough to unseat Milo’s hand, the angle he attempted was useless. Milo rubbed a circle into Alistair’s thigh and he short-circuited; the legs he had been keeping bent, knees to the ceiling, soles parallel to the duvet, slid flat and the ache of relaxation burned through him.

As Milo slid against his prostate over and over again - instead of the punctures of pleasure his earlier terse thrusts had supplied these were more like lying in the snow, the sensation became primary nature - Alistair mustered enough energy to throw one of his legs over Milo’s, feeling the uncanny shifts of his long, embossed ankle bone along his own.

He drove against Milo’s grip but waived the attempt when a tight flex grated down his wrists.

“Jesus-” Milo nipped him, “-you never shut up.” And sucked a hard mark over the same spot.

“Just let me go so I can touch you.”

Milo grabbed Alistair’s face and held him still as he administered a pulverizing kiss. 

Alistair threw his arms around Milo, kissing him back with equal force, his hands promenading over the range of Milo’s back. Milo beat against him.

His orgasm fell across him like the rising sun. Starting at his toes, the pageant of sensation coruscated up to his hips then spun in his stomach then bunched his lungs. The oxygen thinned as Alistair imbibed air only through his nose, roundly pushed over the pinnacle of his orgasm. 

Semen spilt over his belly as Milo fucked him gently through the finale. He finally halved the kiss, breathing softly.

“God,” Milo said and pressed a quick kiss on Alistair. “Lovely.”

Alistair could still feel Milo inside him. The light friction thrummed with a distant pain. Alistair winced, sure Milo would keep going until he came himself, dreading the afterwards but thrilling slightly. What would it feel like?

But that would remain a mystery to him because Milo wrenched himself out and lightly frigged his hot prick as Alistair stroked up his thigh. It was barely a second before, with a low gasp, he finished on Alistair’s belly and staggered down to the bed, on his side, his nose passing Alistair’s flaming cheek. 

Jesus, he looked beautiful, athletic and grateful. Alistair leaned into Milo’s mouth and they kissed, enervated, breaking to heave in dry and flutey breaths. 

“You’re a fucking villain,” Milo said as they broke. A fleck of water fell off his lip and onto Alistair’s. It had been a wet kiss despite the tiredness. 

Alistair couldn’t respond; he was too busy stroking down Milo’s chest to his fluctuating belly that annoyingly fled his touch with every inhale. He pressed forward to kiss again.

Milo stopped him. “I’m being serious.”

“Can I wash myself off before I get the moral order?”

Milo flopped down and waved his hand dismissively. The same way he must treat the servants at the Estate. Alistair slid off the bed and walked unevenly to his bathroom.

The bathroom didn’t have a window but Alistair believed if he was quick enough he could jump out the casement in the main room. Is a nude undergraduate really so unlikely a sight that he couldn’t get away with it, he thought as he ran a handtowel under the sink and washed the union of semen off his belly. But no. He had played into cowardice too many times before.

When he exited the bathroom, he found Milo under his duvet looking up at the football poster. Alistair slipped in next to him. It was a narrow bed and his thigh hit Milo’s.

“One more second,” he promised and reached to the nightstand for his cigarettes. The click of the lighter knocked against his brain, reminding it it would soon receive a draught of nicotine, yet his anxiousness refused to be tamped down. He quickly jammed the cigarette between his lips and sucked.

“Those are really bad for you,” Milo said.

Alistair grabbed Milo’s chin and thrust their lips together. He breathed out a leaden cloud of smoke into Milo’s mouth and relished how Milo struggled not to tear away. 

A flare of smoke tumbled from Milo’s lips as he made to speak. “Mind telling me what all the chat was about?”

“You’re making a bigger deal out of it than it needs to be.”

“I’m not. I’m not making anything out of it. I would like to know why. Presumably, it didn’t weird you out as much as it did me.”

Alistair shifted his shoulder so it stopped touching Milo. He took a furtive drag. “I won’t do it again if you mind so much.”

“Alright, but tell me.” 

“I thought you liked it.”

“Whatever gave you that impression?”

“Nevermind.”

“Come on, you know I don’t believe that.”

Alistair focused on the waxing ash on the tip of his cigarette. “Can we just forget about it?”

“Alistair!”

Alistair sighed. Less made of exasperation and more of a centering, meditative quality. He had to slowly float away from his concerns so when he fucked things up he wouldn’t feel anything. He wiped a freckle of sweat off his forehead.

“When we’re back in tute and I’m - I won’t say beating you because ‘it’s not a competition', but when I am in the lead, argumentatively, you’ll be thinking about the time you had your cock up my ass and you made me cum by fucking me and be entirely unphased by anything I have to say. So, I said things that were supposed to level the playing field. I thought if I demeaned as well, when we got back to normal, there wouldn’t be such a divide between us.”

Alistair only saw Milo’s face crimp out of the corner of his eyes. “I wasn’t trying to demean you. I thought - I probably shouldn’t say it this way - but I thought you wanted it. You had me fuck you without a condom. I hadn’t thought you minded.”

“Not in a physical way, I didn’t mind. I wanted to sleep with you. Maybe I minded in a metaphysical way.”

“A fucking metaphysical way? Are you joking right now?”

“If you don’t want to hear about it-” Alistair stretched to ash his cigarette but Milo put a hand on his waist and lightly induced him back.

“I’m sorry. Just- keep going, alright?”

“So, a metaphysical way, where our equivalency as scholars is compromised when it appears one of us has a social and sexual power over the other. You will always know you sexually conquered me and never be intimidated when I intellectually conquer you.”

Alistair relaxed against the headboard, feeling purged. The puff he took off the cigarette was cleaner and burned inside with a blue flame rather than a squint-inducing orange. He made out Milo’s bewildered expression through the silkscreen of smoke. 

Milo dropped his face onto Alistair’s chest and groaned. 

“Wow. How are we going to fix that?” A smile scythed into his chest. “Shall I blow you before every session?”

“For god’s sakes.”

“You could fuck me next time.”

“Miles, don’t make fun of me.”

“I’m not.” He lifted himself up. His eyes spoke of plain honesty. “If you were to think that would make it better, I would.”

“It’s fine. I’ll deal with it.”

“Alone?”

“I’ve had more practice that way.”

Milo put his arm across Alistair, quite attenuated, and grazed his fingers along Alistair’s ribs. “It doesn’t have to be like that.”

“But that’s how it is.”

He shook his head with a rueful smile. “We’re going to go on like this until we rub ourselves out like erasers. We don’t agree on anything.”

“Yes we do.”

“Come on, the only thing we’ve agreed on is films and that isn’t the part of moral fiber that makes any difference.” 

Alistair’s chest declined under Milo’s head. It had been a braiding of temperaments, he thought, one strand of the political, one of the personal, and one of the physical, a collection of compliments instead of the unadventurous reflection they would have received if they stuck to their proverbial own kind.

Alistair shifted, crossing his legs, bringing his calf away from where it touched Milo. Not that it made a change, they were close as stacked cups. “We’re Disraeli and Gladstone.”

“Right. I’m Disraeli.”

“No. No, I’m Disraeli. I’m going off parties here.”

“And I’m going off temperament.”

“I’m Disraeli on that front too! I feel if we met Queen Victoria, she’d like me more. She’s the monarch I’d most like to meet, after Henry VIII.”

“Basic,” Milo scoffed then he laughed. “Naturally you would prefer someone dead to someone who you could actually meet. Not that you would know what to do with yourself around a queen.”

“It’s got to be mostly intuitive.”

Milo sighed and let himself slip lower on Alistair’s chest, his face mashed in a voice-muffling way. “You’d be surprised.” 

“God, of course you’ve met the fucking queen. Even if you weren’t aristocracy you probably still would’ve. It’s so… Miles. You know if you weren’t an earl’s son I would assume you were a republican. I just fucked a champagne socialist so really an earl’s son being anti-monarchy would only be the second most impossible thing to happen today.”

“Was fucked by, really. I think I did most of the work.”

“Fucked by, oh god, I’m England.” He wriggled his arm out from where it was pinned by Milo’s body and positioned more comfortably over a low grade of Milo’s back. “At least you’ve met who’re getting your taxes, the rest of us rabble can only see them on the balcony. How does your father know Prince Andrew anyway?”

“He really knew Edward better, Andrew was a couple of years older than him, but they all went to school together. I would’ve gone there too if Mum hadn’t pushed for Westminster. Kind of still upset about it. Gordonstoun’s got girls.”

“And so clever too. Lauren’s doing well I presume. In assassin,” he clarified. On his ribs, Milo’s hand faltered briefly then resumed its soft playing, fingers beating against each bone like they were piano keys.

“Defeated. Gemma, the girl at dinner last, sniped her from the parapet when Lauren was going to the library. She appealed to the council that it didn’t count because Gemma should’ve been counted as in the library but Gem said they were both technically outside and the death stood. Lauren was pretty burnt by that. I would be too, she was on about thirteen kills. Gemma’s great, you two should meet. Again.”

“I don’t need any more friends, let alone any from Birmingham.”

“Alistair.” It was solicitous. “Even my housemates have been asking after you. The ‘who’s the guy you keep bringing over, can we meet him?’ genuine sort of thing. You could stand to open up, let people into your heart.”

A comfort suck on the cigarette. “What’s that quote? A conservative under thirty hasn’t got a heart but a liberal over thirty hasn’t a brain?”

“Heartless are you?” Milo said and slid his hand up Alistair’s chest. His hand was icy cold and Alistair’s nipple perked when brushed over. “Can’t say that’s true. I’ll make a liberal of you yet.”

“That’s an admirable notion, while all I have to do is let time run its course.”

“I’ll let you correct my ballot in ten years. Two brains and one heart, we’re like a reverse Time Lord.”

“The scarecrow and the tinman. In incongruent eras.”

“You would prefer to live in another era.” Milo nudged him with his head, like a cat. He essentially knocked Alistair’s leg back flat with that move. “Meet Queen Victoria, tag along with Palmerston, just slip into one of your old photographs. Although you’d be pissed at the sophistication of the camera. I think you’d run around and yell at famous people to get in the frame. Do everyone a favour and switch to studying photography. It’d make you a lot happier.”

“Well, it is a very pragmatic art form. A seminal work of photography can be created in an instant whereas you have every other medium that takes ages to complete not to mention it may not be good when it’s done. Sargent could take days or weeks to complete one portrait of whomever-”

“Madame X,” Milo volunteered.

“Madame X is a very big painting so let’s say, for his sake something smaller-”

“All of his are quite big, aren’t they?”

“Nevermind him specifically, but a portrait artist will, by necessity, if he wants his work to be any good, take his time; he has to. Whereas a photographer only needs to press a specific button and voila: art.”

“But there’s the darkroom, exposure and developing the picture and all that.”

“Yes, but that’s really a chemical process and not an artistic one. My point is da Vinci can dab away at the Mona Lisa for weeks until she’s perfect but Cameron or Arbus can sweep into a room and click their cameras and it’s done. Even if you have to take multiple photos, Abbey Road et cetera, you still have more polished work done than someone who’s just spent the whole day doing mockups of hands.”

“I see your point. You like older pictures though, right? The Dugdales you showed me, kind of aping historical techniques.”

“I like older photographs better, yeah. Most of the time I find modern, like contemporary, art photography sort of boring. When it’s older or looks older, it’s charming. But I prefer pictures of important things the best. St. Paul survives, Iwo Jima. It’s just,” Alistair puffed his cigarette, “photographs, besides diary entries, are the most tangible pieces of history. No matter how good a painting it is, it’s all bias. Think of Anne of Cleves. You know how in history books there’ll be a six-page section of glossy paper with pictures of the people or the places the book is about and I always look at that part first even if I’m in a bookshop and have no intention of buying the book I still turn to that section to look at the pictures so when I’m browsing the rest of the book I know what everyone looks like. And I look at portraits and I think, ‘there’s no way this person was considered attractive.’ ” 

He gesticulated narrowly while speaking, the smoke of his cigarette skywriting around their heads. Milo absently ushered the smoke from the front of his eyes, all the better to see Alistair monologue.

The soft flank of Milo’s ass was pressed against his leg, the longitude of his thigh and calf running a little too far for their feet to disport with each other. The invisible stutters of his muscles attacked Alistair, thrumming up to his unerect penis, the tip of it still tingling from when he had cleaned himself off in the loo. 

“Give them some credit, back in the day, people had to get by on less teeth.”

“It’s just the art’s my least favorite part of the British Museum; I’d rather read the description of a painting than look at it. I’ve done that, gone to an art museum and only read the plaques beside the art and tried to imagine what the painting is from that.”

“I’ll have to go with you next time and make sure you actually look at the art. Though I’ll take you to the National Gallery or Tate or the one at Christ Church, pretty sure none of them are holding any sculptures hostage.”

“God sakes, you don’t actually think the British Museum needs to return its artifacts?” The revving in his mind commenced as he considered the value of great art to be in commercially viable locations when a soft but definite pat lighted on his arm.

“Let’s do this later.” The pat swam along his skin, a grasshopper rasp. “Ask me something distracting.”

“How are you enjoying my Pitt biography?”

“Mmm.” Milo snuggled deeper into Alistair’s arms. “ ‘Pitt was an enduring wit with a blithe and winsome sense of humor that endeared him to his peers. Truly he was a friend to all.’ “

“It’s not very good isn’t it?”

“I thought you said this was your favourite on Pitt.”

“ ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.’ “

“Haven’t gotten to that part yet.”

“No, you twit, that’s Whitman.”

“Haven’t gotten to that one either. I need loads of spare time for poetry; it’s not usually my game.”

“You can keep it if you need. It was only ten pounds. The Leaves of Grass edition at the bookshop was about twelve pounds more than the complete edition which was insane because why would you spend more money on less poetry so even though the formatting was crap I bought the full version on principle.”

Milo patted his hand.

“That was a really riveting story.”

At first, Alistair tried to scoff but the derisive sound was consumed by laughter. Laughter that started in his stomach before it leapt to his chest and jostled Milo’s dark head and spilled from his mouth. It took several moments for him to compose himself.

“Miles, you are so insufferable sometimes,” Alistair said with utmost conviction.

But the gentle stroking up his arm made him reconsider.

“You’ve never called me Milo.”

“Haven’t I?”

“No, never the once. Can you?”

“Oh, alright.”

“Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Well, do it. Call me Milo.”

“Milo.”

“No. Don’t just say Milo; call me Milo.”

“Milo,” Alistair said.

“Yes?”

“Shut up.”

Milo grinned up at him.

“Put out your cigarette and put your arms around me.”

The ash would make an ugly mark on his nightstand but finding the ashtray would require momentary separation. They lay together for a while in the affable quiet of afterglow, touching each other wholly but with a gentleness that made it faint and unlustful, a romantic soul might say lovingly. 

Somewhere, the hand of a clock dropped suddenly and languidly swung back and forth over the six like a toe dipped in a lake.

The ocean sounds of a leg adjusting itself under the duvet; a long inhale like a range of driven snow; a shuffling of hair; breath. 

Milo bounced his pointer finger on the back of Alistair’s hand. The tip of his finger blinked like a Christmas light as the blood blanched out and flooded back in with every press.

“What time’s it?” He mumbled onto Alistair’s skin. 

Peeling himself away, Alistair groped for his phone on the nightstand. “Nearly four.”

A soft groan. “Brillig. I have a study group at four.”

“Can’t you blow it off?”

“I promised my mate Sam I’d explain the Investiture Controversy to him. We set this up weeks ago. I have to go.” He pressed a kiss on Alistair’s temple and deflected his next protest with a look of tender negation. Another kiss for apology.

Languidly, Milo pulled himself away from Alistair and crawled over him to leave the bed. He rooted through the pile of clothes on the floor and climbed into his underwear and trousers.

Alistair shifted out of the blankets as he watched Milo pull his shirt the right way round. He liked to see the way Milo moved so casually, his movements occasionally faulty - he missed buttoning up his trousers the first time - but unembarrassed. He quietly mourned the clothed Milo.

“I wish you weren’t going.”

“You going to miss me?” He wasn’t even looking at Alistair but the silence that followed induced him to look up and see the clean stripe of ruddiness cresting Alistair’s face.

Cross-legged on his bed, naked as the day he was born, Alistair had his face taken into the wide warm hands of the notorious Milo Richards and was kissed sweetly.

“I’ll be back at six. Dinner. I’ll tell you what I thought about your poetry and you tell me what you think about the British Museum.”

“You won’t like it.”

“Let’s wait and see.”

He left the room with one last smile over his shoulder. Alistair stared at the door, at the empty space that used to hold Milo in its palm, wearing his eyes weak as the imperfection in the wood grain turned into snakes that coasted past each other up and down.

The Dugdales had been sitting on his bookshelf ever since the first night, stacked messily, alternations of blue and grey. With a piece of tape clinging to his thumb, Alistair sorted through the collection until he found the _Afoot and light-hearted_ picture: a man in a grove of trees, in the distance, shot from the back, naturally nude, a small, white body of water in the foreground acting as a mirror. Just above the bookshelf, he taped the picture. It looked shit, the bottom fluttering whenever he passed it, but he would buy a frame and hammer it in. Maybe even trade the poster over his bed for a transcendentalist collage like his room was designed by Kenneth Halliwell. It was always favourite of his. The subject far away but not alone; he never saw the photographer, the eye, the perspective of the picture, as the photographer, rather he saw him as a friend crouched in the grass, his gaze soft and loving, giving the subject breathing room. But he would wait for the subject to turn back and wade through the crystal pond, new-baptised, and join him.

Alistair went to the window and cracked the bottom open. Cool, late afternoon air gusted by his face. He leaned upon the sill. He inhaled the warm smell of trampled grass. Milo wouldn’t pass by this way, it was the hindquarters of the building, so Alistair wouldn’t see him for a couple of hours. But he would see him at dinner and the day after. And the day after that. And that thought made it easy to turn back to the empty room. Knowing, that for part of his day, he wouldn’t be alone.


End file.
